Der Fernsehturm Adventure

At the suggestion of our American neighbors, Andy and I decided to head to the TV tower (Fernsehturm) on Sunday to get a nice view of the city. Beth and Sean had told us that there's an older train that you can take for a more scenic view as you wind through the hills of Stuttgart to the tower, so we decided to take it. The train is called "The 15" and is sort of like riding in a cable car in San Francisco. It's very narrow, and very loud, but feels quaint and you catch some lovely views of the city as you go along.

A couple of stops from the TV tower stop, Andy looks at me and says, "Did he just announce that this is the last stop?". Of course the announcement was in German, and I thought: "maybe he just told us what that stop was called..." So, we stayed on the train. The train did continue for a little bit, but then turned hard left into a roundabout, and stopped behind another train....facing back down the hill towards downtown. Andy was right. Turns out there is new construction, and The 15 no longer goes all the way to the tower. So, we get off the train and walk over to a couple of conductors to ask them if they know how to get there. To which one of them replies, "Sure. Just climb aboard my train, go downtown, and then catch the U8 to get to the tower." Basically negating all of the progress we had made up the hill. Doh! So, we decided to go the rest of the way by foot. After all, the tower has lights and is 150 meters tall, so you can see it from almost anywhere.

After maybe 10 minutes of walking through the woods in the direction of the tower, night falls. We are now deep in the forest with no flashlight, and have just passed a sign that says "Caution: snakes" (or so we thought...turns out it said, "Caution: gate". Hey, we're learning!). Anyway, 20 minutes later we made it to the tower without any snake encounters.

Once there, we paid €3 each to ride the elevator to the top and walked out to a spectacular view of the city. It was open air up there, but since Sunday was pretty warm it wasn't too cold. We decided to put together a lovely series of pictures all the way around the top (go here to view them...if you speed up the slideshow it's kind of like a video). After we had our fill of the open air, we went into the Panorama Cafe, at the top of the tower, and had a piece of Pflaumenkuche (plum cake) and cappucino. All in all, a successful adventure.

We'll be happy to take any of you to the tower if you come and visit us, but most likely we'll take a different route. :)