The Black Forest is both pristine nature and a playground for the rich and idle. Or at least the moderately well off with a bit of time on their hands. Actually, it is a place for the economically distressed and permanently frazzled. Like parents of young children. Or academics.

Consequently, nestling in the valleys below the mountains are many, many alpine style hotels designed to accommodate hordes of people seeking respite from the German industrial complex. They have names like ‘Flair’ Hotel, ‘Wellness’ Hotel, or ‘Luxus Landhaus’. Some of them look like towering apartment blocks, others alpine chalets that have grown too big for their foundations. There are simply hundreds of them. 

Choice paralysis. How could Rose and WM possibly make a decision? What were to be our criteria?

Number one emerged early. An informant of ours had warned us that the German definition of a twin-bedded room included two single beds securely fastened together by six-inch nails into a double bed. Individual duvets or not, Rose and WM did not fancy waking up in an inadvertent embrace. The German’s cultural endorsement of naturism and nudity did not apply to us. We are British, after all. Anyway, Rose does not like beards. 

So, it meant we were looking for two roomed places. Or a bed and a sofa. Or a bed and a kennel for Rose.

Secondly, we had to find places at the end of our walk stages. We quickly discovered that some of the endpoints were essentially no more than sheep pounds. Call us old and decrepit, (yeah, go on, we know it’s true) but we did decide one of the key criteria was a place with an actual roof. This meant at times we needed to look a little further away from the hiking endpoints.

Enter Booking.com.

One of the world’s most widely used hotel booking sites, booking.com, provides a handy feature whereby you put in a town/village/road name, and it gives you suitable properties either in the town/village/road or nearby. Allegedly. 

We quickly discovered a number of significant flaws to this apparently foolproof system. More Booking.really? than booking.yeah! The biggest flaw was that much of the area of the Black Forest we were wandering through came under the urban parish of ‘Baiersbronn’, which was not only our starting point but the postal area of several of the other section endpoints. Most of the hotels we identified ended up being back where we started from. Having planned to wander around 18km a day, we did not really fancy wandering back again just to get a bed for the night.

Our solution was to use the ‘View on Map’ feature in Bookin.really? which at least showed us where the potential guest house was compared to our endpoint. However, another big problem immediately emerged. Almost all the hotels, particularly the small cosy looking ones, were full on the dates we wanted them (fully booked up by October 2023, over seven months from our May 2024 wandering dates). Some did not take people for single nights. We felt inexorably pushed towards the big pantechnicons of pleasure. Hello Flair and Wellness!

Our first foray into booking.really? looked promising. We booked a nice medium sized place right at the beginning of the walk. Unfortunately, the next day we received a message to say that we – yes us, Rose and WM, not them – needed to cancel the booking because the owners were selling up at the end of the year and did not know what was going to happen thereafter. One wonders what would have happened if we had missed the message. Presumably we would have turned up to find the place locked up or turned into an aquarium.

Although there were plenty of other missteps along the way, our final criteria was absolutely inviolate. We had to have bears, preferably of the soft toy variety. No soft toy bears, no booking. Here is one we found earlier…..