Open Air Museum

Today we drove from near Neuschwanstein to Strasbourg, with a stop off in the Black Forest for an open air museum, and to let the boys out of the car to run off some steam.

The Black Forest covers a valley between a lot of mountains, and as you descend to the bottom near the museum, it gets darker and darker because of the shadow of the mountains. It looks a lot like some places in the Upper Peninsula.

We passed at least a dozen places selling cuckoo clocks, and even a factory outlet for them. 

The museum has many old houses, and you are allowed to go into them and explore them.

The one above was from 1599, and is in great shape. Most of the houses had animals on the first floor and people on the second, so I imagine that the smell, at least during the summer, and the flies were something fierce. The animals are gone now and the stalls are sparkling clean, but you still get a great feel for how things used to be, without the bad smells and too much realism. Just enough.

Here is a wooden gutter, made from a hollowed out log.

Every house had a tiled stove like the one in the house we were just staying in, and at least one of these corner benches and tables.

One thing that was shocking was how dark the interiors were. There was usually one bare bulb hanging in each room, and some small windows. The original inhabitants would not have had electric lighting of course, but they would have used candles sparingly and only at night. 

The photos below were taken with our camera with the flash on. Once we took the pictures we discovered to our great surprise that the bed was brightly painted and the dishes in the next photo were not deep gray like we had thought.

Then it was on to Strasbourg and bed!