Lauren and I had found a beautiful 42 km hike in the Black Forest a few weeks ago that we wanted to attempt during our stay in Baden-Baden, but we were pretty sure we couldn’t finish a hike that long in just one day. So for weeks, we have been torn between a shorter and less exciting hike, or to just go for it and try to knock the 42 km hike all out in a 12+ hour marathon. By a stroke of pure luck, we found a great solution while we were in Oberwesel, Germany. I had picked up a random book off the bookshelf of our castle hotel that was focused on rating the different castle hotels and restaurants of northern Europe; an exciting read for sure, but because I only had one night with the book I decided to skip forward to Deutschland to look at the specific regions we would be traveling in. I only found two castle restaurants that would be reasonable for us to stop at on our journey but both would still be at least a half hour detour from our planned travels. So I just took a picture of the 5 relevant pages and then put the book down. Last night while trying to come to a final decision on which hike to do, I was looking at the GPS coordinates of the hike overlayed on a map, and lo-and-behold, there was Schloss Ebertstein, one of the castles I had found in the book two nights ago, not 10 minutes away from the trail at the 27 km mark! That made the decision very easy for me, I knew we would do our desired hike and stop for dinner at Schloss Eberstein, then take a taxi back to our car.

I called Schloss Eberstein to check if they had any available reservations for dinner, and the lady who answered replied that “Sorry, we only have availability before 6 pm,” to which I replied “Perfect, we can be there at 5 pm. Is there any dress code?” She clearly didn’t expect that response from me, but said “okay”, told me there was a casual dress code so we could wear basically anything we liked and took my information to make the reservation. I interpreted casual dress code to mean hiking clothes are okay and hoped for the best

We figured the hike would take us roughly 6 hours, so we planned to start at 10 am to leave one hour of buffer before dinner, in case we ran into any issues or got distracted taking photos on the hike. We arrived at the parking lot for the hike about ten minutes prior to our planned starting time and immediately began walking. The trail started off nice and quiet, walking through farms on a gravel path, which led us to a small quaint town that was tucked into the hillside. After passing through the town and a few more farms, we began heading into the heart of the Black Forest.

The forest was dense, green and beautiful. It felt like we were in a fairy tale, and I could easily imagine Hansel and Gretel getting lost in this forest. Along the trail we had a variety of unexpected sightings, including a few doors built into the hillside… what laid behind them we do not know.

We hiked straight through for most of the day, only stopping for photos or water and snacks a few times. At the peaks of the mountains we were hiking on, there were incredible views of the valleys below. We felt like we could see for miles and miles, even across into France.

Lauren’s knee pain started to hinder her hiking ability and moral at 21 km mark, so we took a quick break and had some food and snacks and pushed on. We didn’t want to stop for too long because we were getting close to 4 pm and we didn’t want to rely on the buffer time unless we really needed to. Also, the weather was suddenly looking slightly more gloomy, so we wanted to avoid any potential rain. I was starting to feel like this was a perfect storm brewing: if Lauren’s knee started to hurt too much, and it began raining, and we were still 5 km from our destination, I’m not sure how I would have managed things.

It did end up raining on us for the last 20 minutes of the hike, but we successfully made it to the castle with plenty of time to spare. We were able to be seated very quickly and we enjoyed some delicious food, but both Lauren and I agreed that we prefer our dessert “ohne Alkohol,” as the Germans would say.

We got a cab back to our car then made it home to the hotel where we laid and rested for a bit. Before getting too tired, we decided to treat ourselves to a night at a natural thermal spa, which is one of the main attractions of Baden-Baden. We headed to the most modern of the natural thermal spas in town and spent some time downstairs exploring the different heated rooms and pools, and then headed upstairs to take in the Roman Spa, which we hope will help prepare us for what we’re doing tomorrow.