Reset: France

The third country we visited this trip was France.  France is simply to the west of Basel and cute farming towns start just ten miles outside of Basel.  This region is called Alsace.  It is (very!) famous for wines and includes a famous wine tour of small towns.  The full tour did not seem like the right kind of day trip for us, right now, so Wednesday after work we headed to region's capital Strasbourg for a brief visit.

Strasbourg is about an hour and half away from Basel and is the next large European city in the immediate area.   As usual this trip, we hit construction and  a lot of traffic so it took us until 8pm to get to the city.  That was ok, since work didn't start the following day until 9:30am for training.  (See I told you these hours are good!) We easily parked at La Petite France at the edge of the city.  It was quite large for such a quaint area.

See, isn't it pretty!?  From there we tried to find a French restaurant or at least a particular Irish bar we'de heard about, but this was the touristy area.  We tried to walk, but without a good map it was very hard.  Then it started to pour sideways rain.  We were soaked to the bone and our shoes were pouring out water.  Yet being me, I continued to try to find my tourist attractions.  French towns are terrible when it comes to making sense with streets, so I failed to find much of anything.  I did walk around the area where Gutenberg invented the printing press and saw the town hall, opera, theater, and some other pretty buildings but again I couldn't see well out of my rain hood.  Finally we could see the top of the cathedral so we did go there.  It has the largest astronomical clock in Europe and the old building is very large, even for France.

This region's most famous food is some kind of a flatbread with a odd cream, onions, and bacon.  People love it.  I tried this "pizza."  At least the view of the Cathedral was amazing from my seat at the restaurant.  In the future, I'll stick to French wines.

Then we trekked back to the car finally, even after the 1/3 mile bridge was closed due to the late hour and we had to walk 1/2 a mile back to the car the completely other way in the pouring rain.  The one thing I really wanted to see in this city was the European Union home offices, which weren't open to the public, but I mean I love me some government buildings.  We never found it.  I figured my European luck had ONCE AGAIN run out in France.  

RESET: On Saturday when we awoke, even Jordan agreed we should try to see France again.  We figured if we were as miserable as Wednesday we would get back in the car and race back to the comforts of Switzerland.  It was supposed to rain all day, but luckily it held off in France.  We muddled over 15 miles to eat in a little farming town and I found a French bakery, which is always a good start.  Then we drove 15 more miles to a cute town called Colmar.  Colmar's claim to fame is being a cute walled city with La Petite Venice (see a theme!?) and the home to one of the best sculptors-Frederic Auguste Bartholdi.  This town had statues everywhere.  

The coolest thing was we ventured right outside of the city for this surprise:

A small replica of the Statue of Liberty was a gift to the city 100 years after the death of the sculptor by the first lady of France.  We made sure to get my picture to ensure our future child had a picture of something American in his room.

After this good time, we decided to get really adventurous and drive up a mountain to a castle.  This mountain is right outside of the start of the famous Rue de Vins road tour and the town is called Saint Hippolyte!  (laughed didn't you?)  The castle was a Roman settlement first and has been used even up to WWII where the Germans and then Allies used it as a base since it was very safe.  This castle was the best we have visited yet because you could see very easily how this functioned as a town.

More castle pictures later, since our camera died and we had to use an IPhone.  From here we ventured back down to Saint Hippolyte and Mulhouse.  We will blog about these later because each are a story onto themselves!

And we haven't even blogged about Germany yet!!!

--Lauren