At Europa Park in Freiburg

For the 25 April long weekend we thought we'd take a tour of Europe. All of it? Well... yes! If you go to Europa Park in Freiburg, you can tour the whole old continent. Europa Park is one of the largest themed amusement parks in Europe; each area recreates a nation with rides, shows, roller coasters, restaurants, etc., and one day is barely enough to see it all. Despite the rainy day, we all had a wonderful time and I highly recommend it. I won't go on about the park, but if you'd like to know more, the official website is:. During the remaining days of our holiday we stayed in Freiburg, the main city of the Black Forest area (Baden-Wurttemberg).

It's a beautiful city, surrounded by greenery and with a strong ecological spirit: the historic centre is pedestrianised; along the avenues that circle the centre you can count up to 20 underground car parks; alongside the entire road network, both inside and outside the city, runs a network of cycle paths, where the countless cyclists really rule the roost. It almost seems like another world, even though it's not far from us. The centre of Freiburg is typically medieval and winds around the square "Munsterplatz", which houses many architectural treasures, among them the Gothic cathedral and the House of Commerce (Kaufhaus) with its characteristic red colour and the sculptures painted at the windows.

Along the streets of the historic centre, strictly pedestrian, run little water channels created in the Middle Ages for firefighting purposes, which today are one of the hallmarks of this "jewel city". We then dedicated a day to the Black Forest, following the clock road, which touches various villages where local craftsmen specialise in making cuckoo clocks. You can find them in every shop and workshop, but the largest cuckoo clock in the world is in Schonach. It stands practically on the façade of a little house, with the mechanism inside the house itself, which you can visit for a 1 euro ticket. In Furtwangen we visited the clock museum, very interesting for both adults and children. On the final day, on our way home, we stopped in Lucerne in Switzerland.

Unfortunately we spent too little time to explore it thoroughly, but what we saw made us realise that a whole weekend just for it would certainly not be wasted. We would have liked to linger longer at the café tables overlooking the lake, crossed by two beautiful old bridges, one of them wooden and covered, but we did enjoy a sandwich by the lake while the swans came to claim their share of lunch. Along the strictly pedestrian streets of the centre, so much so that we saw a traffic warden giving a cyclist a ticket, we admired the two very ancient squares and the painted buildings and, to finish, we took a look at the city from above. We walked the path along the city walls, built in the second half of the 1300s, and climbed to the top of the restored towers open to the public, bidding farewell with a panoramic view to a beautiful and elegant city. Bye from Hilary