As coronavirus, or COVID-19 if you’re fancy, sweeps the world, there’s little to do other than stay inside and refresh instagram. Or is there? You could panic buy toilet roll, perhaps. People seem to have a much faster metabolism than I do, or there are uses for toilet roll to which I am not yet accustomed. You could go on a cruise to escape, but there’s a chance that someone on-board has the disease and then your ship will need to be quarantined off the coast of some island until they decide to release everyone, like a new Sean of the Dead film.
We decided to go for a drive. The weather was absolutely beautiful on Sunday morning and the snow-covered hills of the Black Forest looked extremely majestic. It’s been the warmest winter since records began here in Germany, and it’s been rather mild, wet, and windy. There’s even blossom.
There have been some very cold days, and some snow, but just not the amount that’s generally expected this time of year. Being as my car sports a set of winter wheels, with basically new Pirelli Sotto Zero tyres, it only feels fair to show it some cold.
The Black Forest is visible from every room in the apartment, even the bathroom, as it essentially completely surrounds the city. This makes for beautiful views in general, but also means that in the summer it’s a short sprint to some amazing driving roads for the motorbike. They’re great to drive a car on too, but since riding a bike i have less of a motivation to thrash around in a car.
So we took a (mostly) relaxing Sunday drive up to the nearby Kandel mountain. The road up has british-level potholes, but it’s a mountain road, so I’ll cut it some slack, but I do think it’s in dire need of resurfacing. Many of the other roads in the Black Forest are more like a racetrack with glass-like surfaces. This road, is not. But, I wanted to take in some of the view as well, so didn’t mind going at a sensible pace.
As we climbed, things turned slowly whiter and whiter, until we were evidently above the snow-line. There was over two feet of snow (0.667 yards for my metric readers) at the peak. It was a challenge to find a parking space, with all spots filled with families going tobogganing. You wouldn’t know there was a zombie virus going around and it was the end of civilisation.
After donning my “winter boots” we had a nice walk in the snow, then decided to hop into the car and cruise down the other side of the mountain. We had a light lunch, as we had a cheese fondue planned for the evening.
Pretty much a perfect Sunday.
