Last few days in Basel

Around Basel

Basel has a few unique attractions near the city.  Since we were in Basel for nine days, we tried to stop at these attractions also.  At the very edge of the city, at the heart of the last port on the Rhine River, there is a place where you can stand in three European countries at once.  Of course I had to visit!  This place is only marked at the end of a pier by the country flags.  We can now say we have stood in Switzerland, Germany and France at the same time.

Another day, we had agreed to take my work colleague to Zurich before her early morning Friday flight, so we stopped at another attraction after work on Thursday night. The work colleague had bought way too much luggage to carry herself and was nervous about the Swiss trains, so we had to drive her. I was surprised Jordan agreed to drive since he frowns upon too much luggage and not trusting the trains. The other main attraction was about eight miles outside of Basel. Augusta Raurica is a 2,000 old Roman settlement and is a tourist town set-up for this purpose only.  The Swiss have spent a fortune excavating and restoring the town in the past fifty years.  New archeological digs have recovered entire houses and many artifacts even as recent as early this century. The best preserved space is the Roman Amphitheater.  It was the best ruins we have ever seen, since we have not yet made it to Rome.  There were many other ruins we toured, including a huge bath area with underground wells and a house with an oven which was preserved from the Roman times due to a fire and bombings.

Basel is one of the towns that has been integral in the modern art movement and has a few museums devoted to this kind of art.  We did not visit any of these museums and enjoyed venturing out to see other things that actually shaped or contributed to human society.

BLACK FOREST

On Friday, we crossed the border for the third time into Germany.  

Fribourg

Drive

Titisee

Furtwangen-Cluckoo Clocks

Drive

Tried to see Baden-Baden but the A-5 was stopped for very bad accident

A-5 autobahn

Back to Basel

Wine Country in the Alsace

After our castle tour at the top of mountain, we ventured back down to the small village of Saint Hippolyte (Still laughing?).  We had Euros to burn because the castle was free admission on this particular Saturday.  As mentioned earlier, the town is one of the first stops on the Rue de Vino in the Alsace region.  This area has vineyards everywhere you look.  

The village had many signs, but only for wineries and hotels This is the only source of income for this area.  I feel they make a lot of money doing these two things.  I know I could not have a proper wine tour of all the local vineyards or varieties, but I wanted to buy some bottles to take home to enjoy next year.  I had quickly used TripAdvisor that morning to look up the area attractions, so I did not have my usual fool-proof plan on what location and vendor to buy things from in this town.  We parked the car in the middle of town and just walked towards the signs.  As we looked for an official wine store or a vineyard sales house, we realized that is not how this would work in this town.  It is Europe, so it would have to be more interesting.   You simply ask if the vendor speaks English, walk into a barn or side shop on their property, taste the wine by pointing at the list and buy anything you like.  Each place would let you taste as many as you like from their wine list.  We couldn’t truly enjoy this part of the buying on this day since I am pregnant and Jordan was driving. Once we realized there was not any shops, we stopped at the second house we saw because it had two friendly dogs to greet patrons. She spoke excellent English and was very friendly.  She quickly explained how informal it was to buy and we went about purchasing our first couple of bottles.  We went to two more French farmhouses after this one. We bought five bottles during our three stops, including four different types of wine.  We decided if we can return to Basel we will do a wine tour in Hippolyte for a day and try to enjoy all the varieties this region offers.

We drove off from Saint Hippolyte back to the highway and ventured to one more French stop-Mulhouse.

Mulhouse-Car Museum

The largest car museum in Europe is located in Mulhouse, France.  Mulhouse is the industrial area of the Alsace region.  Mulhouse does not really have anything to offer for tourist except a train museum and the car museum.  The car museum focuses on the Bugatti car line.  

Overview of Trip

I am very glad to have to had the opportunity to go to training for work in Switzerland.  I am hopeful this is not the last time I will be asked to visit Basel for my job.  I truly enjoyed the city of Basel and this trip confirmed I really like Switzerland. I like Switzerland not only for its beauty and quiet charm, but for its cleanliness and politeness.  The Swiss would not make any tourist or citizen go out of their way or not be able to find something to please them.  Even in the remote locations.  It is amazing.

This was the first time we have truly done daytrips and stayed at one “home base” during our European adventures. We stayed in Basel for eight nights straight in a small apartment.  It was great to not have to pack our bags up every two or three nights.  However, if we came back we would need to venture out further into other countries since we almost exhausted the list of day trips from Basel and most Swiss locations.  

We have decided the trains are easier overall to use for travel, but in certain parts of Europe it is not practical to rely on trains. Many of the things we saw this trip were not accessible by train, so it was nice to have a car.  Also, the car made it easy to go to the next sightseeing place at your pace or just stop and visit anything of interest.  Our smartest decision was to upgrade to get the GPS because we would have been lost so many times without it!  Parking in the city was easy near our apartment, but it was expensive to park and get gas.

We have been so blessed to go on six international trips (and countless domestic trips) in our 5 ½ years of marriage.  Overall it was a great fourth European trip!  Our Fourth trip took us to four countries…not too bad for a 6 ½  month pregnant person! That is our best record yet—even I usually stop after three countries.  

We have a funny feeling our biggest adventure is yet to start.  Here’s to 2014 and our new adventurer!  

--Lauren

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

Guess Where We Were Yesterday?!?

Around Town In Basel

Today; a short post about the city of Basel.  Basel is a city that touches, and even stretches into three countries.  It has the only airport in the world that is based in three countries and it's called EuroAirport.  The town is very Swiss, has a strong German influence, and most of the food is Italian. As you walk around you can't help but overhear many languages, but primarily German.   It is considered one of the most international cities in the world.  It has the international bank center and many global companies are based here.  However, somehow it maintains its Swiss charm while being quietly multi-national. 

Basel is famous for modern art and a red Marketplatz.  It is has also been a big stop on the Rhine river for businesses since Roman times.  

Two different nights this week, I enjoyed my favorite Swiss thing =Rosti.  Rosti is like really good hash-browns smothered in Swiss cheese.  I added bacon and a fried egg to mine.  The portions are large, but I ate all of my dish because it was so delicious.  The German waitress said "ah, see for two and pointed to my belly".  It was amusing (to others at least).  Sadly I am having to refrain from my other favorite Swiss thing - the local white wine Fendant - which is only produced in Switzerland.  It is only rarely exported, even to the EU.  I have tried to order it in the US, but no avail.  But I am bringing some home for next year!

We will end up staying eight nights in one tiny apartment.  It is like living in an IKEA showroom!  We have tried to live more like the locals by going to the grocery store, having a car, using the tram to get to work and walking around at night to then go linger over a long dinner.  Too bad I can’t drink like the locals (le' sigh).  It has taught us we could definitely live here if we could afford a TWO bedroom non-studio apartment in the city.  However, we would really miss real diet coke and definitely have to learn German.

Now someone help me to get a job transfer.

-Lauren