"I took the long way home"

Can't remember who wrote that song but today it will be my story. It is 6:30 am here (9:30 pm yesterday Victoria time) and I am just getting up. First there is the 40 minute drive to Offenburg, then the two hour train ride to Frankfurt airport. I'll have about a 3 hour wait for my flight to Calgary but the killer will be the 4 hour layover there before the flight to Victoria. So, I'll basically be up for the next 24 hours. Ugh!  The trip has been good and, of course today, the weather is perfect. Not so on much of the trip. Oh well, we can't control the weather, can we?  I loved getting to know Berlin better and exploring Budapest with Nawal. Sharing Alsace with Jo Ann and Jeff was so much fun and it is always a pleasure to spend time with my close friends in Rhinau. Now . . . where to next?  Hmmm. The south of France in September perhaps?  Stay tuned and thanks for reading my blog.

And now for something completely different!

Last Saturday, before Sue and Keith got back, I went out for dinner with friends of theirs who live in the village. Pascale and Klaus are vegetarians and very into organic products. They invited me to go with them to the big Bio (organic) fair being held in Colmar. I jumped at the opportunity to do something less touristy which would give me more insight into the culture here. So today, along with Sue, off we went to the 33rd Foire Eco Bio d'Alsace to check out the more than 400 stalls with organic or "green" products.  I will never figure out why there was a stall selling CDs there!  I skipped the examining the composting toilets and straw being used for insulation.  Instead, we gravitated to the stalls with cheeses, olive oils and wines interspersed with the occasional soap and confiture stand.  Most of the producers were French but some were also Italian. We spent 4 hours trying the various products and it was a lot of fun. Highlights were seeing the nun from the Momastere de Salan selling wine and candies, the wine tasting as various stalls and the Parmesan Reggiano which was fabulous. It was all a lot of fun but I kept thinking the "food safe" police in Victoria would have had conniptions if they had seen some of what was going on. However, it after all the French way and I'm good with it.

It's All in the Details

Yesterday, Sue and I headed over to the Alsace Wine Road for a visit to two of my favourite of the lesser known villages:  St.Hippolyte and Bergheim.  As we wandered around them, I wondered what makes these places just so charming. I know, I know!  There are the colourful half-timbered medieval buildings, the cobblestoned streets, the ubiquitous flowers, the little narrow alleyways and the storks nesting in the tops of many of the towers.  What isn't charming about all that?   But, it is something more; something I couldn't put my finger on. Then, as we looked at the houses more closely, I figured it out.  It is the whimsical little details everywhere you look that make everything so very special.  Whether it is little wooden shoes forming part of a balcony and the witch dolls hung from the eaves on houses on Bergheim, the brightly-coloured flowerpots on the stairs of a house in St. Hippolyte, or a flowerpot hat on a tree stump "head" peering over the fence of a garden in Rhinau, all these little details create a very unique personality which is quintessentially Alsace!

Just exactly where am I?

Since 1989 when my friends bought a house in Rhinau, I've visited this Alsatian village of about 2500 inhabitants often. I have showcased other villages in this area but never this one.  I thought it was time to share a little info.  Rhinau is situated on the Rhine (which here forms the border between France and Germany) and is directly across from the German village of Kappel. The two villages are linked by a free ferry service and the crossing takes only about 5 minutes.  Rhinau is about halfway between Strasbourg and Colmar; the former, 40+ km to the north and the latter, about the same distance south. Lahr, Germnay, is roughly 20 km east. In France, villages are awarded "flower" designations depending on how prettily a village is bedecked with flowers. When I first started coming here, Rhinau had been awarded none but it has steadily improved and is now a "3 flower" village. There is a small river - more like a stream by Canadian standards - called the Brunwasser running through.  Near the banks of the Rhine, there is a statue of the Virgin Mary meant to protect  the village from flooding.

While there is some industry here (e.g. a company that paints the "spoilers" on big truck rigs), it is primarily a farming village. What is somewhat unique is that, rather than the barns being in the fields, they are located with the houses. Sue and Keith have a big one behind their house as do most of the older houses in the village. This does mean there is lots of farm-related traffic lumbering up and down the village streets. There is a white aspargus farm which ships the product to many restaurants as well as sell to locals.  Because it is the season, we wnet there yesterday to load up for a big "feed" of it last night. There are fetes d'asperges - and in Germany, Spargelzeitfests everywhere.

The village church was bombed during the war and the ruins have been designated a historic site.  Also just outside the village are bunkers which are remnants of the Maginot Line - and we all know how that strategy worked out!  Some of these bunkers have been given a new life, one as the headquarters for the Rhinau fishing and hunting club and another as a summer "cottage" (at least it would be cool inside!). Other than that, it is a typical Fremch village - 3 boulangeries, a weekly market, the always present tabac and PMU outlet, four restaurants, and a clock tower whose bells toll every quarter hour 24x7.  Besides its charm, it has a very special in my heart because of all the fabulous memories I have of being here with very good friends.

"Deja vu" all over again

Last Friday, just before I dropped Jo Ann and Jeff at their train, we'd had a hurried lunch in what looked like a charming little town just southeast of Offenburg called Gengenbach. I had hoped to get back there this trip and, yesterday, after I dropped the rental car off, Sue and I went back. It felt slightly familiar (deja vu) as I knew where the parking and the restaurants were but there was so much more to discover. First off, the shopping was fun - classy gift shops and clothing stores plus a very nice Metzgerei (butcher); then there was the historic walk around the town, the small memorial to the 12 Jews taken from the town by the Nazis (right next to the restaurant where the Dubneys and I had eaten), the Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) commemorating victims removed from their homes by the Nazis, the charming Engelgasse (Angel Alley), the somewhat weird statue of spring Carnival characters, the many historic buildings, and the town's old towers and ramparts.

A short note about the Stolpersteine. I had read about them in a Rick Steves guidebook but never noticed them before. They are small brass cobblestone-shaped plaques embedded in the street or pavements outside homes from where victims of the Nazis (Jews, homosexuals, intellectuals) were removed. Their message is terse: name, date of birth and fate. Moving in their simplicity.

While we had two hours there this time, there is still a lot more in this town to explore. Then it will be déjà vue all over again!

A Walk in the Black Forest

Yesterday was the Dubneys last day in this area before heading up to Koln (Cologne) to visit family there. Because they were taking the train from Offenburg in the afternoon, we used the time to do a bit of a drive through the Schwartzwald (Black Forest).  Offenburg is on the edge of the Schwartzwald and about 1/2 hour north of Lahr. It was a lovely, sunny day - a big change from the rain and wind the night before. We headed through Ettenheim, just south of Lahr up into the hills going through Seelbach, Schuttertal, Prinzbach and Biberach. Along the way, Jo spotted a medieval castle on a hill so I took the rather challenging drive up to it praying there wouldn't be an oncoming car on the way up or down. There wasn't. We did the short, but steep, hike up to the castle which is called Hohengeroldseck and dates from 1260.  I don't recall ever seeing it before. We were rewarded with stunning views across the Rhine plain toward the Vosges Mountains in Alsace and Jeff got to see close-up the medieval castle ruins he was wanting and he even climbed up some of them.

From there, we headed to Gengenbach, a charming town southeast of Offenburg. It was my first time here as well and, unfortunately, we didn't have any time to explore it; it was just a rushed lunch (unheard of in this part of the world) and the quick trip to the train station where Jo and Jeff almost jumped from the car to get to their train with about 15 minutes to spare. It was a fun time with them. Gute Fahrt to them - I'm not being rude; it means have a safe trip!

Playing Tour Guide

Well, the tour of Alsace continued over Wednesday and Thursday.  Wednesday was a visit to Strasbourg which included a boat tour of the city and lunch outside in a pretty little; oh yes, and a visit to the Mephisto store for me. I had saved the best of Alsace (at least in my opinion) for last so Thursday we drove along my favourite part of the wine road - from Itterswiller to Eguisheim.  Our time was limited so we only did a "drive-through" of Bergheim and Ribeauville, stopped for a walk and lunch in Riquewihr, skipped Kaysersburg, and finally visited Eguisheim which is often used in travel posters, before driving to Colmar for a brief visit to that scenic town.  In Eguisheim, it was a must to visit another of those famous Alsation vineyards, Freudenreich.  A bottle of their award-winning Riesling is less than €6!  It was fun as we drove along with Jeff "scoring" the houses and villages for their cuteness, most of them receiving scores over 7 and many getting an almost perfect 9.5!  We kept remarking how these little medieval villages look more like movie sets than real places. Thankfully, none of them were too crowded which made wandering around a pleasure. The lucky part was that we managed to finish our tour just as the dark clouds rolled in and the rain started pelting down. We did capture a unique rainbow on the drive back. I never knew rainbows could be horizontal!