What an adventure this past weekend was. A group of us
wanted to visit the Black Forest and tried to plan a trip all last week. Every
time we tried to sit down to plan anything, we could never come to a general
consensus. On Friday morning, the day we were supposed to leave for the Black
Forest, I received an email stating that our request for our Airbnb was denied.
I quickly tried to find an alternative and clicked the first place I saw on
booking.com. We lucked out and were able to book an apartment seated in the
mountains in Oppenau. While traveling to Oppenau, we had to change trains a
couple of times. We successfully made it to all of our connections despite some
of the delays. Everything was going smoothly until we were about to reach our
train stop in Oppenau. Nick, Karen, and
I got caught up talking to some people we met from England. Mid conversation,
we look outside the window of the train and see Dae, Joanna, and Joseph
screaming and waving their arms for us to get off the train. I stood up so
slowly from being in shock and a couple seconds later the train started moving.
We successfully missed our train stop. To add to the fun, when we arrived to
the next train station, we pressed the button to open the door on the wrong
side of the tracks, and the train started to move again a few seconds later.
Yep, that’s right, we went not one, but two stops down. When we finally got off
the train, we felt completely defeated. Karen was laughing her butt off, Nick
was fuming with anger, and I showed no emotion really just accepting our fate.
There were no more trains running for the night and we were in the middle of nowhere.
The only thing surrounding the train stop was the forest. In the midst of
defeat, we found a glimmer of hope when we saw one younger girl get off the
train. We knew this was our last hope, so Nick ran after the girl to the car
she was about to get into. He kindly asked the woman driving the car if there
was any way she could drive us back to Oppenau and explained our situation. The
women surprisingly let us jump in the car with no hesitation. When we arrived
in town, we tried to offer the woman money for driving us, but she would not
take it. I could not get over how kind it was of that family to go out of their
way just to drive complete strangers back to town. There are some really
special people in this world.
The next morning, I woke up to the most beautiful view from
our apartment. A few houses surrounded our apartment, but it was mostly nothing
but mountains and rolling hills in site. The man who owned our Airbnb was so
kind that he went out of his way to drive us into town to buy some groceries.
Once we were fully charged for the day, our adventure began with a leisurely
3-mile hike into the town of Oppenau. We planned on hiking all the way to a
waterfall trail from town, but we ended up taking a bus right as we started our
way up the mountain. Once we reached the trail, I really thought we had found
Narnia. It looked like a magical forest filled with bright green trees and a
waterfall that ran down the entire length of it. There was a part at the top of
the trail that had a beautiful view of rolling hills and quaint houses in the
distance. It was all so picture perfect. At the top of the trail, we stopped at
a cute little restaurant where we refueled for the rest of the day. The time
finally came to head down to the bottom of the trail to catch the last bus of
the day. Nick had told us all day that the last bus arrived at 8 pm. We soon
came to find that he found that information out on a blog that had been posted
2 years ago. The last bus actually came at 5 so we missed it by about 3 hours.
That was when the real adventure began. We started our 5-mile trek down the
mountain. I have to say, I am actually very grateful we missed the bus. The
hike was absolutely gorgeous and the weather was perfect since it was later in
the day. Right as we were about to reach the bottom of the mountain, a car
stopped and offered to drive half of us into town and then come back to get the
other half of us. These kind humans went completely out of their way and drove
me and Karen back to town, then came all the way back to grab Joseph and
Joanna.
Out of all the places I have visited in Europe, I have to
say that Oppenau had the friendliest people of all. Even though so little of
the people living there spoke English, we had multiple encounters with
strangers who went out of their way to help us. It was very refreshing to be
surrounding by so much kindness, and it makes me realize how much good is in
this world. The Black Forest was beautiful along with all of the people living
there.
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