The Quest for the Schneckennudel

This morning we decided to go for a long walk in the forest to the west of Bad Dürkheim. We have a map of the town that shows paths in the forest and a few sights to see ... my goal is to visit each of the sights on the map.

Here's the map. We live where the pen tip is pointing to on the right side, and our goal is the big red circle in the lower left of the map with the number "39" in it. It is labeled as "Schneckennudel", which I think basically means a spiral (schnecke is "snail"). We had to find it to see what it actually was!

It's not all that far to go, I'd say 5 miles roundtrip, but what's missing on that map is about 785943789643 other trails in the forest. Thankfully we had an iphone with us and google maps actually had most of the trails in it so we just had to stop a lot and find the correct trail to take. You could easily wander around in the forest for days and days completely lost and finally die a slow horrible death of dehydration or starvation or hypothermia in there. It's going to be really pretty once the leaves change though so I'm looking forward to spending more time in there this fall.

So, as expected, the "Schneckennudel" was a big spiral that you walked up in order to get a nice 360-degree view of the surrounding hills and forest:

I didn't take a picture in the direction of Ludwigshafen/Mannheim as that wasn't the pretty direction. :)

Some shots from walking through the forest. Don't let old-man-Martin fool you it was like 60 degrees out! He still set out in long underwear, t-shirt, sweater, and hat! There's definitely something wrong with him.

The Wurstmarkt

For 9 days each year spanning the 2nd and 3rd weekends of September, Bad Dürkheim hosts the largest wine festival in the world. It runs 24 hours a day Thursday-Monday the first weekend and Friday-Monday the second weekend. We were in Sardinia for the first weekend of it this year but returned in time to enjoy a few nights of the second weekend.

There are food booths, game booths, carnival rides, a few shops and, most importantly, wine booths! Each of the vintners from Bad Dürkheim had a booth - maybe 25 booths total. Some of them had a pavilion filled with benches like in the picture below and some of them had outdoor sitting at tables like at a restaurant.

At all of these booths you get yourself a Weinschörle, which is supposed to be 0.25 liters of wine and 0.25 liters of sparkling water but they were definitely making them more like 70-30 in favor of wine when I was there.

Here I am holding our Schörles:

The first night we went we hung out with our realtor and her group of friends. They're all locals so they have a table reserved at one of the restaurant-like wine booths. Here are some of our schörles on the table:

We learned that there is one day of the festival where only the locals are allowed to go for what they call early morning drinking. They all show up at 7am and sit together and drink until 10am while the festival is closed to everybody else. On a Monday no less!! I love this town.

The second night we went was the last night of the Wurstmarkt, Monday night. There were fireworks at 9pm and it was the most crowded night of the festival. We rode the ferris wheel and took some pictures of the crowds below:

There is also this really high up spinning ride that I wanted to go on but Martin said no. :(

We did manage to enjoy a lot of fair (read: junk) food at the festival. Mostly traditional German fair food. Nutella crepes, Flammkuchen (a very thin crust topped with some creamy cheese, onions, and pancetta), bratwurst, döner kebabs, deep friend potato patties (traditionally served with apple sauce but as an American I take mine with ketchup), and German kisses which are rather large marshmallows with a wafer base covered with chocolate and other assorted toppings. So. Good. (and so full of sugar!) We brought some home and I put them on Martin's laptop keyboard so you could tell how big they are:

L'Isola di San Pietro

While we were on Saint Peter's island of course we went around to some beaches! But first we attempted some bird watching on the west coast of the island. There are several hundred falcons there in the summer - they fly there all the way from Madagascar to have their babies every year. But we didn't really see any, except for a few flying around occasionally. We instead poked around the coast a bit, which is quite rocky and steep in spots.

This is Cala Fico (plus Martin), the most photographed spot on the island. Many of the falcons have nests on top of the rocky cliffs:

Cala Fico from a little higher up:

After Cala Fico we tried to drive around and see more of the coastline but were foiled by narrow dirt roads and dead ends. There are a couple of paved roads on San Pietro (aside from in Carloforte where they're all paved) but if you go be prepared to drive on some dirt roads. Didn't run into any livestock in the streets here at least!

Next we went to La Caletta beach. There was a little restaurant on the beach where we ate lunch. Martin made a new friend there:

There were a lot of cats on San Pietro. It was a lot like in Turkey - the restaurants and random people fed the street cats and there were just cats everywhere.

La Caletta beach:

In general the beaches on San Pietro were not as nice as the ones in Cala Gonone. They still had the clear water but the blue color was not quite the same and there was a little sea grass in the water (okay I know I'm nitpicking here, these beaches were still gorgeous). I think it's that the beaches on San Pietro didn't have the "wow" factor that the beaches in the Gulf of Orosei had - no steep cliffs behind them and hiding them from view until you're right in front of them.

San Pietro is known for its annual tuna roundup. For 400 years tuna have been swimming by San Pietro and into large nets every spring/summer. So, naturally, one of the main dishes available in restaurants in tuna. And they make tuna in every way possible. I tried some smoked tuna while I was there:

We also ate tuna with pesto and pasta and tuna on pizza (we also had smoked salmon on pizza earlier in the trip which was awesome) and tuna sandwiches with tomatoes and eggplant. Other tuna dishes included salted tuna and tuna with tomato sauce and pretty much anything else you can think of. In some restaurants it was hard to order something off the menu without tuna in it.

La Bobba beach, where we went on our last day on San Pietro:

There are two big columns that stick up out of the ocean near La Bobba. They're a huge tourist attraction but I'm not sure why.

And this trip wouldn't be complete if I didn't show you a picture of some of the pizzas we ate. I think Martin's pizza has tuna on it and mine has rucola, ham, and tomatoes:

Carloforte

Our last stop on this trip was St Peter's island (isola di San Pietro). We stayed at a really nice 10-room hotel where not a single person spoke English (or anything other than Italian for that matter) in Carloforte. Even though communication at the hotel was challenging at best, I still really liked it there. They had custard-filled donuts for breakfast! And chocolate cake. Really really tasty chocolate cake too. I love Italian breakfasts.

But I digress. I loved Carloforte because it was fun to wander around all the little streets there. I tried to take a lot of pictures of them and a few of those pictures might have actually turned out okay.

The view from our hotel room balcony. The pond-like bit of water you see is where salt is being made. The little strip of water you can barely see beyond that is the ocean. To the left of this picture is also the ocean but I didn't take a good picture of it:

With Garmisch:

There are lots of flamingos in the big salt making ponds. Try not to get vertigo from looking at my crooked picture:

Below are some of the pics I took around the streets of Carloforte. At night some of them had neat lighting from the ground up or with old-fashioned street lamps which I thought was neat.

This pic has one of those 3-wheeled cars in it. Lots of people drive them on San Pietro.

In the evenings all the old people sat in the main square on big round benches. And around 9pm all the children would come out to play as well and the square would become complete chaos.

Martin and I enjoying the nightlife in the square after dinner:

Cala Gonone and Beaches in the Gulf of Orosei

After our two nights in Cagliari we drove up to Cala Gonone through the mountains/hills on very steep, narrow, sharp-turned roads. Cala Gonone is a small town on the east coast of Sardinia. It sits in the Gulf of Orosei, which contains many small beaches guarded by steep cliffs. Below is a picture taken from our hotel room balcony of Cala Gonone and the gulf extending to the south. There are maybe a dozen beaches lining this gulf, all rather small and hidden amongst the cliffs. The beaches are not large at all ... just small plots of sand or stones. We'd say the longest beach, Cala Luna, was less than a quarter mile long. But the water at these beaches was the clearest, cleanest water we'd ever seen. No seaweed, no trash, no murkiness at all.

We spent 8 nights in Cala Gonone (at the top of a huge hill and let me tell you we were happy not to have to walk back up that hill after dinner anymore when we left!) and went to as many of the beaches as we could. Some you can hike to (actually you could hike to all of them if you have the time and endurance). There is a special 7-day hiking trip you can take that goes by most of the beaches but it is a fairly technical hike with some rappelling down steep cliffs involved and a lot of rock scrambling on goat trails.

You can take big ferries to some of the beaches, you can kayak to all of them, you can hire your own boat for a day or two or hire a smaller boat with a driver or go on a 12-person tour, some you can drive to, and some you can only get to by foot or small boat and swimming as boats are not allowed to go near the beach itself. Lots of options!

Obviously Martin and I tried every form of transportation to see all of the beaches. We hiked to Cala Luna, drove to Cala Cartoe, and took boats to all the rest. If we had had one more day we would have rented kayaks as well. Below is a picture or two from each beach.

First up is Cala Luna. It is one of the few beaches that has sand instead of big white stones. It has large caves on it which are neat to poke around in and also some steep cliffs that people climb:

Here I am floating with my noodle in front of the caves along Cala Luna:

Here are more of the caves along Cala Luna:

There are caves like the ones below along a lot of the coast. There are some places where you can go inside them and wander around a bit on platforms but we didn't feel the need to do that on this trip.

We also spent a lot of time on Cala Cartoe because it was only a 10-minute drive from our hotel and it was a nice big sandy beach that was not very crowded. It was also really shallow for a long way out so you could walk out really far. Garmisch also enjoyed it here:

Martin, enjoying the shade under our little yellow umbrella:

Cala Biriola. This is one of the beaches with smooth white rocks instead of sand:

We snorkeled a bit around these rocks but there aren't many fish in these waters.

Cala Mariolu. This, along with Cala Gabbiani, had cliffs behind it that started to block the sun around 3pm. So you had to get here early to enjoy the sun.

Cala Gabbiani, which I thought was the prettiest beach. Possibly because big boats weren't allowed near it so it wasn't very crowded. I didn't take many pictures at this beach because the sun had already gone behind the cliffs so the beach was all in shade.

These are probably all starting to look the same to you.

This is called the Pool of Venus. It's not a beach but a little cove where the water is a very bright aqua color. People drive their boats here and drop anchor for the day. I know I would:

Finally, we come to Cala Goloritze. It was the farthest away from Cala Gonone and is only accessible by foot or swimming (from a boat offshore, boats just aren't allowed to get within a certain distance of the beach). It's a UNESCO site. By the time we got here on our small boat trip it was cloudy and the beach was no longer in the sun anyway due to the cliffs behind it. But you can still tell that the water is a gorgeous deep blue color. And the cliffs to the side of it are very unique:

Floating on our noodles near Cala Goloritze:

That's the beach in front of Martin. It gives you an idea of the size of these beaches. The cliffs two pictures above are just to the left in this picture:

And here are some of the cliffs inbetween the beaches, which are also quite breathtaking:

And some goats, hanging out in the road out of town. We came across horses, cows, pigs, and goats in the roads. Apparently Sardinians don't believe in fences.