Schwarzwald Kloester

Our Best-of-the-Schwarzwald-Accessible-by-Car Tour (my dad has bum knees) continued today, taking us over Schauinsland and down into picturesque Todtnau. The name Todtnau has nothing to do with death (Tod), but rather was the last in a long line of variants starting with Toutenouua, presumably meaning "all new"--which perhaps it still was when written records first mentioned it ~1025 A.D. We stopped there because it was pretty. Little did we know that Todtnau was the birthplace of Karl Ludwig Nessler, inventor of the permanent wave, a historically interesting tidbit that we saw no evidence of at the little Italian cafe where we had lunch.

From Todtnau it was on to the town St. Blasien. St. Blasien has been the site of a monestary since the 9th century. After a fire in 1768, architect Pierre Michel d'Ixnard designed a new church. At its completion in 1781, the early neoclassical dome was the third largest in Europe: 36m wide and 62m high. The interior white marble glows in the light that pours through the windows, even on cloudy days like today.

After pausing for some gelato with odd bits of unidentifiable papery stuff in it, we piled back into the car and headed over to the Kloster St. Trudpert in the next valley over, the Muenstertal. Nestled on a hill, the abbey is surrounded by beautifully tended gardens, with an array of flowers still in bloom even this late in the season.

St. Trudpert was an Irish missionary who arrived in the southern Schwarzwald in the mid-7th century to start a hermitage. A knight who was supposed to help him instead murdered him while he slept under a pine tree. A lovely Baroque onion-domed church now stands (so the story goes) over the site of his murder, and a healing spring bubbles forth below one of the Kloster's chapels.

Having grown up near the University of Illinois's experimental farms (now the site of their veterinary medicine school), I couldn't help but notice the earnest winged cow inside the church. Poised to gallop into the air, she and her heavenly animal kin pull a golden chariot. Riding in the chariot, left arm raised, is someone we did not have time to identify before the church closed.

Tip of the day, offered by my wise mother high atop Schauinsland: You're destined to make many mistakes in your life, so you might as well get started now.