We had a plan. A proper one — trains looked up, timings worked out, three countries in four days. Europa Park on the Thursday, Freiburg Friday morning, Strasbourg Friday afternoon, home Saturday. Basel somewhere in the middle if we could manage it. The kind of itinerary that looks brilliant on paper at 11pm the night before you leave.
Then we spent two days at Europa Park.
If you’ve never been, Europa Park does something to you. It doesn’t just tire you out — it fills you up completely, right to the edges, until there’s genuinely no room for anything else. By the time we rolled into Freiburg on the Thursday evening, Strasbourg was still on the list but the energy wasn’t. We sat with a coffee and looked at the times. A flying visit to two places, or a proper day in one?
We chose one. We chose Freiburg. And Strasbourg became the one that got away — the destination we’ll get to eventually, still sitting on the list somewhere between Basel and a second trip through Alsace.
We’ve never once regretted the decision.
The first Ganter of the day. This was approximately 11am. No regrets.
We started at the Seepark, which turned out to be exactly what we needed after two days of rollercoasters. It’s a proper urban park — not a manicured municipal thing with signs telling you to keep off the grass, but a sprawling, lived-in nature reserve wrapped around a lake so startlingly turquoise it looks like someone’s had a go at it in Lightroom. They haven’t. It just looks like that.
The morning was already warm. We crossed the love lock bridge — there must be hundreds of them, little declarations of forever bolted to the railings above the water — and wandered into the Japanese garden, all stone lanterns and cascading water and impossibly well-tended maples. A few families had already settled in. Children were in the water. A dog was doing what dogs do when they find water, which is immediately and completely lose their minds.
Someone’s always in love somewhere.
Not what you expect to find in Baden-Württemberg. Completely wonderful.
We found the wooden walkway — a cathedral of timber and glass cutting through the trees — and followed it round to the open grass on the far side. And we stopped. For maybe an hour, we just stopped.
It’s rarer than it sounds. We don’t really do stopping. Our default setting is the next thing, the next corner, the next street worth photographing. But the Seepark earned it. About fifty people were scattered across the grass — unhurried, unbothered, going absolutely nowhere. A group of students had set up a game involving a trampoline and a ball that appeared to have no fixed rules but a great deal of enthusiasm. Someone’s labrador had achieved total happiness in about eighteen inches of water. An older couple sat reading on a bench. Kids ran in circles for no particular reason, the way kids do when the sun is out and the grass is dry.
We watched all of it. We had another Ganter. The mountains sat in the distance doing their mountains thing.
Sarah, documenting. The lake really is that colour.
Every city has one. The beautiful thing that nobody bothered to maintain. We loved it.
Eventually, as always, the Old Town called.
Freiburg’s Altstadt is one of those places that rewards the kind of walking we do — not the efficient tourist circuit between the famous things, but the slower, more directionless wander that keeps pulling you down side streets you had no intention of taking. Around every corner: another church, another ornate doorway, another building that makes you stop and wonder who thought a place like this was just normal.
The Münster announced itself early — a Gothic tower the colour of dark honey, rising above the rooftops with the confidence of something that has watched eleven centuries of human activity and found most of it mildly amusing. It was half-wrapped in scaffolding, as cathedrals always are, as if somewhere in the planning permissions it was written that the thing could never be entirely uncovered at any one time. We photographed it anyway.
The Freiburg Münster. Currently approximately 40% scaffolded, as it has been since 1954.
Münsterplatz was busy — market stalls, cyclists, tourists doing the obligatory look-up at the spire. We found the Fischbrunnen, a Gothic market fountain built in 1483, still standing in the square with its gilded figures intact. Beside it, the Historisches Kaufhaus — the old merchant hall in that particular shade of deep red that looks like it was mixed specifically to photograph well — was drawing a crowd of its own.
The Historisches Kaufhaus. Built 1520. Still going.
Built 1483. Freiburg doesn’t really do understated.
We walked the Bächle — the small stone channels that run through the streets carrying fast, clear water down from the hills. There’s a local legend that if you step in one, you’ll marry a Freiburger. We stepped in one. We are already married to each other and have absolutely no idea how that works legally.
May in Freiburg. The chestnut trees were doing their best work.
[PHOTO: Image 27 batch 1 — half-timbered house over the Bächle stream. Caption: “The Bächle — Freiburg’s famous street-level streams. Fast, cold, surprisingly easy to fall into.”]
The back streets gave us everything else: a narrow alley with a medieval inn sign swinging above cobblestones; a tattoo parlour in the Stühlinger quarter with a life-size tattoo gun mounted above the door and BRONX painted across the front in letters you’d see from space; ornate sandstone doorways so detailed you could spend an afternoon on a single street and still not take it all in.
Freiburg’s backstreets reward the wrong turns.
Naturally.
We never did find out what this building was. We simply appreciated it.
In the afternoon, we took the funicular.
The Schlossbergbahn climbs from the edge of the Old Town up through the trees to the Schlossberg — the hill that watches over the city from the east. You can walk it, and we did walk part of it, but the funicular is the thing to do. It’s a blue cable car on a steep track through the green, and it deposits you at the top with views that make you briefly reconsider every other city you’ve ever visited.
Looking down from the Schlossbergbahn. The Münster spire is visible from basically everywhere.
The view at the top is one of those that earns the word properly — the whole city spread below you, the Münster spire rising from the middle of the terracotta rooftops, the Rhine plain stretching flat and green to the west, the Vosges mountains a blue-grey line on the horizon beyond. We stood there for a while. We took the photographs that photographs never quite capture.
The Schlossbergbahn. Worth it.
Then, because we had the time and Strava was open, we did the Black Forest loop — 2.25 miles through the forest on the back of the hill, all dappled light and pine smell and a stone fountain in a clearing where Sarah stood and looked exactly like someone in a fairy tale who has just found the witch’s cottage and is deciding whether to knock.
The forest fountain on the Schlossberg loop. This genuinely exists.
The views through the trees — the city, the spire, the hills — came and went between the pines. Strava called it “Black Forest loop. Stunning views.” For once, Strava was right.
Freiburg from the Schlossberg. The Münster does this from every angle.
We ate twice, which is either a sign of a successful day or evidence that walking 8.4 miles works up a serious appetite.
The first was the proper one — Hotel Oberkirch, right on the Münsterplatz, red-checked tablecloths, the full traditional experience. We had no idea what anything on the menu was, which is exactly how it should be. Google Lens translated. We pointed. Two enormous plates of Sauerbraten with Knödel arrived, dark with sauce, serious with intention. Two more Ganters. The English-speaking waiter at our second stop — wherever that was — felt almost anticlimactic after the full immersive experience of ordering blind in Baden dialect. Almost.
Hotel Oberkirch. The Knödel were the size of a small planet. We finished both plates.
We walked back through the Old Town as the evening settled. The Münster’s spire caught the last light. The market was packing up. Someone’s dog was still in the Bächle.
Strasbourg will happen. It’s only an hour on the train from here, and we’ll be back this way at some point — maybe on the way south, maybe for its own sake. It deserves its own day, which is exactly what it would have been competing against in Freiburg.
Next time, Alsace. This time, we got it exactly right.