On to Alsace and Lorraine
Trip Start
May 01, 2008
1
11
43
Trip End
Jun 24, 2009
Where I stayed
Strasbourg Campanile at Lingolsheim
Le Lavoir des Reves at Genueille
Sarrebourg Hotel de France
Besançon,
Franche-Comté,
France
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Besancon is an amazing place; it was a huge walled fort, built high up on a cliff on top of an ancient Roman city in the 17th century by a chap named Vauban who the French seem to have a lot of time for, as he built forts all over the place. We ran across a couple more of his in a small town called Saline des Bains. These were also perched on high cliffs on opposite sides of the valley where the town was. In Besancon, we were surprised to see a type of zoo in the moat of the old fort. They had a mixture of Baboons, Okapi, Llama, ostrich and other animals running freely there. Not what you would expect.
May 29
We usually take back roads when we can, instead of the busy expensive motorways, and the last couple of days have been beautiful scenery
Nancy
. We have been driving through very winding narrow roads through Alsace and Lorraine, which have changed national boundaries between France and Germany a number of times. However the buildings are more German looking with wooden shingles on the outside and shutters on the windows and all lined up in neat rows with window boxes all matching with mostly red geraniums. It seems so strange to see so many German sounding names like; Sarrebourg (where we stayed last night), Schneckenbusch; Niderviller; Brouderdorff; Guntzviller; Obersteigen and then see the French"La Poste", boulangerie (bakery) Gendarmerie (Police Station); Mairie (Town Hall)) in the towns themselves. The kids all speak French, but a lot of the older people still speak the "Alsation" language which is a high German dialect, and it is making a comeback and even appearing on some roadsigns in the rural areas. Apparently there are many different versions, and it almost died out after the French Revolution, but under the Nazi occupation in WWII the speaking of French, and even the wearing of berets was an imprisonable offence. Reminds me of the Gaelic speaking areas in Ireland and Wales which seem to be fashionable nowadays!We drove through large pine plantations with majestic tall pines lining the roads and soaring to the skies so that nothing could grow underneath, like in our tropical rainforests and you could see the straight trunks lined up for a way through the vegetation which managed to grow with the bit of light that was allowed in by the cutting of the roadway.
Every now and then we would get a lovely surprise like at Dabo (sounds like Dubbo), with a chapel perched high on a hill, so that you could see it for miles around. We climbed up to the top and were rewarded with a magnificent view over the countryside This was in the Vosges mountains near the border of Alsace & Lorraine, and wasn't even in our guide book
Nancy
. Neither was Vesoul, which also had a large religious monument housing a statue of the virgin perched high on the hill. This has a series of large white crosses all the way up denoting the stations of the cross, and was built as a thanksgiving to the Virgin for sparing the town from the cholera epidemic of 1854. (Probably the first and last time H will ever do the stations of the cross) Obviously people in France loved building religious edifices high up on top of big rocks. I told you about Le Puy and Mont St Michel didn't I? Then there are the numerous chateaux which always seem to be built on the highest spot like at Angers and Chaumont sur Loire. Still they all pale into insignificance next to the enormous Strasbourg Cathedral built from the local pink sandstone with 142 metre high filigree spire which although built in flat ground in the centre of the city, can be seen from most of Alsace. Like almost every other cathedral and church in France it is the Cathedral of Notre Dame. May 30 Strasbourg
After a disastrous night trying in vain to find somewhere to stay in Nancy (the city was booked out) and driving until after 8pm before we found a hotel with a spare room (we started looking at 3pm!) today we checked in at 10am to a Campanile (a chain like Best Western) on the outskirts of Strasbourg, then took the very efficient,quiet, tram into the city to explore. It is a very attractive city, a real mix of French and German truly European! It is one of the three capitals of the European Union and has a medieval cityscape of bridges, black & white half- timbered Rhineland buildings, cobblestoned streets ad squares and a famed 12th century Gothic cathedral, all of which have survived centuries of war and destruction. It is ringed with canals and waterways and we took an open air boat trip up the Rhine River and this was the hottest I have been all trip, but was a good way to get an orientation for this city which is the capital of Alsace
Rocher de Dabo
. Of the approximately 120 people on the boat, only 9 (including we 2 Aussies) wore hats, which reminds me, we have seen scores of cyclists every day and hardly any of them wear helmets, even when they are screaming down enormously steep mountains!During the day we "discovered" the Mont St Odile (the patron saint of Lorraine), another monument built on top of a huge rock. And I was wrong before about H not doing any more stations of the cross. This place had a lovely walk around the base of the rock through a glen filled with moss covered rocks and a variety of plants, and up high on these huge rocks were the stations of the cross made as a pottery pictorial. They were very beautiful.
On to Colmar which is like a fairytale city with a toy train puffing through the cobbled streets taking the tourists around, and delightfully bright painted houses leaning over the canals and spilling a variety of flower baskets into the reflections on the water. Musicians played on various instruments to the patrons of the many open air restaurants and we could hear a mixture of many languages being spoken amongst the people in town.
