Since tomorrow is NOVEMBER I think it’s about time I catch up on my travel posts, especially since the trip I’m about to tell you about took place on my birthday, which was back in August! Bad blogger. Bad, bad blogger.
I first heard of Bad Säckingen thanks to a restaurant in Karlsruhe with the name Trompeter von Säckingen (which has since closed… there’s now an African restaurant in the premises). Intrigued by the name, I asked Jan about it and he told me it was the name of a book by Joseph Viktor von Scheffel, which is loosely based on a true story that took place in Bad Säckingen (which back then was just called Säckingen – Bad in the name of a town means it’s a spa town, and Säckingen became Bad Säckingen in 1978. There’s your German/history lesson for today). Intrigued by the story, I looked the town up and discovered it was supposed to be pretty and decided I wanted to go there… a fact that Jan reminded me of when I was debating where to go on my birthday.
My friend K came down for my birthday and came with us to Bad Säckingen. It’s in Germany, but only takes about 20 minutes to get to from Basel Badischer Bahnhof.
First of all, we went for a little walk around the town. I promise the only editing I’ve done on the photos below is resizing them to save space on the blog. It just was that nice a day!
The town centre isn’t huge and before long we were back down at the river and the other thing Bad Säckingen is famous for (for a given vale of the word “famous”) – its wooden bridge. The town on the other side of the bridge is called Stein and it’s in Switzerland. The border is in the middle of the river, so of course we had to have some fun standing in two countries at once. In one of the photos below, you can see mine and K’s feet right on the border marking… the closest you will ever get to seeing a photo of one of my friends on this here blog 😉
We headed to the Schlosspark (castle gardens) next, where we found a few trumpeters!
Finally it was time for a late lunch. We went to a steak restaurant called Marco Polo where I had bison because I had never tried it before. Plus a beer… it was my birthday after all!
I took another few photos as we wandered back down towards the river, then we walked along to the weir where many cormorants were hanging out waiting for the easy fish pickings.
One more quick glance down the river, and it was off back to the train station and home to Basel.
Bad Säckingen is not exactly huge and I’m not sure what you would do there on a rainy day (although there is a trumpet museum in the castle), but on a sunny afternoon it’s well worth a wander around. If you had a bit more time you could even cross the river and take a walk into Stein… I’m not sure whether there’s anything there worth looking at, but you could at least say you’d spent the day in both Germany and Switzerland…
Bad Säckingen was my August trip for Take 12 Trips 2016.
Confuzzledom 