It was a beautiful Saturday, so I took the afternoon off work. It has been a while – it seems Saturdays there is always something that comes up that requires sitting at the computer or going out and doing something for someone.
My wife said she had heard of a nice walk in the Black Forest, starting in St. Ulrich, which is about a 30-minute drive from our home in Sulzburg. Four kilometres, sounded like a nice way to spend the afternoon.
Of course a lot of it was uphill, which isn’t that much fun if you are in the sunshine. And, we got distracted on the walk. What should have been four kilometres was 10 by the time we got back to the car four hours later.
The scenery was stunning. We discovered a place in the middle of nowhere, with home-made ice cream. There was interesting flora and fauna, churches and shrines, trees and streams in abundance.
My guess is that I will be sharing the photos for at least the next week (with maybe a break for the Ontario election). Since today is Sunday, we’ll start off with a series of pictures of a church.
In an area where local churches can be more than 1,000 years old, Heinehof Chapel is decidedly different – it was built in 2007. There is a tradition in this part of Germany of micro-churches built by landowners for their families. I haven’t written about it because until Saturday I had only seen them from the highway. At some point I hope to visit a few of them and give a more lengthy explanation of this tradition.
Heinehof Chapel is located beside a popular local restaurant, technically in the municipality of Bollschwell but really, it’s at the edge of the Black Forest – and closer to St. Ulrich than Bollschwell if you are on foot. The owners of the restaurant had the chapel built, and it is open to the public. It looks bigger than some of the private churches in the area, but there is only seating for about a dozen people.
I think the idea is that hikers, or restaurant guests, can take a moment to pause, pray and reflect. Given that today is Sunday, why don’t you do that now too?
