Hiking in the Black Forest

From the locks at Vogelgrund, I crossed over into Germany and followed the back roads up into the mountains near the Black Forest town of Titisee. The villages near the river were surrounded by orchards of plum and apple trees. The plums were obviously ripe on the trees and roadside stands were selling the first pickings of apples. These orchards disappeared as the hills got higher and higher away from the river valley. Finally, it all turned into the pine trees of the Black Forest.

The Black Forest, like the Vosges, is a popular place for hikers. The woods are criss-crossed with trails that are carefully mapped in terms of distance and difficulty. Some folks spend their whole day out walking. I only spent about three hours.

Some say the Black Forest gets its name because, when viewed from inside, the trees block out the light and make it like night. This is not entirely true. Some sunlight reaches the ground, especially where the hiking paths are carved. (Actually, many of the hiking paths are logging paths. Walking through the forest you see piles of firewood carfully stacked for later pick-up.)

So not black....but definitely a lot of shade. And in every direction you look, the tree trunks go on forever, or at least into the distance where the blend together and appear almost as wall.

Driving Down the Rhine - The Locks at Vogelgrun

Starting at the Swiss border, the Rhine is contained and kept navigable by a series of dams and locks. These are positioned about every 10 to 15 miles as the river runs between France and Germany. At these stations, the river is split into 2 or 3 channels. The first channel is usually blocked by dam to produce hydroelectricity. A second channel has a set of locks to allow the barge traffic to move up and down the river. (sometimes the locks are combined with the dam in the same channel) The last channel is normally a large spillway to divert the water that the locks and dam can't handle. At strategic locations, there are also flood zones to allow the river to spill out over its banks without flooding the cities or breaching the levees.

From Neuf Brisach you can drive just a few kilometers to the east and cross over the Rhine at Vogelgrun. The two lane road runs atop the dam and there is a nice parking spot for folks that want to get out and watch the river traffic go through the locks.

This sequence of pictures just shows a barge coming and going.

Driving Down the Rhine - The Maginot Line

One of the fun things about driving with no plan is that you feel free to chase historical markers. Near the town of Marckolsheim there was a sign pointing to a Maginot Line memorial. Sure enough, just on the Northern edge of the town there was an old bunker that had been converted to a museum. Old tanks, half-tracks, and pontoon bridge sections had been positioned nearby to expand the displays.

Now, we had seen pieces of the Maginot line before - along the side of the highways you sometimes see an old turret springing out of the weeds like a big, rusty mushroom. To the north there are supposedly some sections that are well preserved with underground tunnels open for touring. We've not made it there yet.

This museum was just a single bunker with no underground tunnels or anything. Inside they had lots of old WWII mementos on display. Seems that one of the biggest worries for the defenders was the threat of poison gas. Gas masks were on display everywhere. Below is an especially clever one intended for babies.

Just in front of the bunker was a depression in the earth that was proudly marked as a crater caused by a Stutka dive bomber. The bomb had missed, but just barely.

Inside was a history of the bunker, which was manned by local Marckolsheim boys. When war was declared in September 1939, all the villages and cities along the Rhine were evacuated to get the citizens away from the fighting. The citizens of Marckolsheim went to Dordogne to wait for the French victory. In October 1940 they were forcibly returned to Marckolsheim, only to find most of their village smashed to pieces despite the protection of the Maginot Line.

Driving Down the Rhine: The Old Fortress at Neuf Brisach

One day I was playing around on the computer to look for driving directions. I was playing with the maps and stumbled across the village of Neuf Brisach. On the map, Neuf Brisach looks like a perfect circle. From the Satellite view, the village looks like a snowflake. It's obvious that the city planning was not haphazard.

In the late 1600's, Louis the XIV claimed Alsace for France for the first time. He was smart enough to realize that claiming is easy, but keeping can be difficult. Consequently, he commissioned his foremost military engineer, the Marquis de Vauban, to devise fortifications to keep the new territory. Neuf Brisach is the product of Vauban's design.

Now, Vauban was responsble for building some of the most defensible fortresses in Europe. Strasbourg, up until the Franco-Prussian war, was a citadel fortress on the French frontier. Vauban designed the defenses around Strasbourg back in the 1680s, doing the best he could with an existing city. He did the same with Luxembourg. With Neuf Brisach, however, he was not constrained by having an existing city to defend. Rather, he was able to design the perfect fortress in the middle of an open field. The perfect fortress built from scratch to defend the Rhine valley from invasion. Today, the village of Neuf Brisach still sits almost entirely within the old fortifications designed by Vauban. You can still walk around the defensive walls and admire the parapets and cannon emplacements. Sheep graze in the areas designed to be flooded in case of attack.

The fortress has been tested only a few times since it was built. The last time was in WWII, when the Germans hunkered down in the city as a last gasp before retreating back across the Rhine into Germany. The allies bombed and shelled the city mercilessly.

The local museum recounts the story of the allies who finally captured the city. A number of photos, such as the one shown below, recount the tale of Benjamin I. T. Wigg, of Carmel, Indiana. Strange to be reminded of home so far away from home.

Driving Down the Rhine

Tuesday, August 15 was a holiday in France. Most folks, including Theresa, were out of town. I decided to spend the day driving down the Rhine valley.

Normally, when driving south we take the main highway that runs at the foot of the Vosges. Or at times we've crossed into Germany and taken the roads through the Black Forest. I'd never actually driven through the bottom lands along the river in Alsace.

At first, driving through the farms along the Rhine could easily be confused with driving through Southern Indiana along the Ohio river. Field after field interupted by scrub land and small woods. Lots and lots of corn too. The roads connecting the farming towns are pretty much like the county roads in Posey County, Indiana. You really feel at home when you get stuck in slow traffic behind a tractor.

The crops you pass are a little different. Though corn is the main crop, there are sizeable fields of tobacco and sugar beets and hops. Not so much wheat and cabbage as you see around Strasbourg, but still a little being grown.

You also know you are in Alsace when you drive through the farming towns. The smaller ones on the back roads are frozen in time - moreso than I would have expected. Lots of the half-timbered houses that look to date back a couple of hundred years (if not more). Also, you find that a typical home in the village can have old barns adjoining it at right angles to form kind of a courtyard. This is because people live in the village rather than right next to their fields. They travel out in the morning and have to take everything they need with them. When they return in the evening they bring all their equipment (and I suppose their harvest) with them to store in their barns or to feed the chickens in the courtyard. At one time, they would have brought the horses back in the evenings to put them in the barns. Today, they bring the tractor back into town to park for the night.

Pictures below were show a house in typical farm town. In the first, you can see the barn in the background...but you can't see the building to the far left that completes the courtyard. Next photo was taken peering through the gate into the courtyard. The living quarters is to the left and everything else is stuffed full of hay, straw, and farm equipment. Farm towns seem to be sprinkled about every 4 or 5 kilometers. I suppose that this was fixed by the distance that one could travel each day to and from the fields.

Also, every now and then you see a sign pointing to a ferry crossing of the river. Not too long ago these ferries would have been pretty busy all up and down the Rhine, hauling people back-and-forth from the German side. Bridges have taken most of the traffic, I assume, in the areas around Strasbourg and Colmar. It's only in these bottom lands that are distant from the bridges that I've seen the ferry advertised.

Another thing that struck me is that from these farming villages the mountains of the Black Forest stand out on the eastern horizon much closer than the Vosges to the west. For hundreds of years, the people living here were closer to the German culture than that of France. Case in point - it was a lot easier for me to cross over the Rhine than it was to cross over the mountain pass towards St. Dié into old France. (And I had the benefit of an automobile). The people here weren't French and they weren't German. It's easy to see why the Alsatians were able to preserve their language and traditions for so long....and why it was only with the advent of roads and railways in the 20th century that the region could begin to be integrated with France.

Enough of that. Stay tuned for more sites from along the Rhine.

Driving Trough the Mountain Towns

The wine fair at Colmar was only worth about three hours. So afterwards, I took the long way home by driving through the Vosges mountains. ( I didn't mention it before, but Theresa had returned to Indianapolis for 2 weeks so I was making this trip solo.)

August reached the halfway point and the weather was still more like November than summertime. Even the locals were complaining that it was unusually cool. Each day brought more clouds, more rain, and temperatures in the 60s.

Driving in the mountains in this weather just serves to bring the clouds and the rain even closer to you. At times, you actually climb up into the clouds and can't see anything for the fog. At other times, you can look out over the other mountains and see the patchwork of sun in some spots and rain in others. And of course, the higher you go the cooler it becomes. On this day, it was in the low 50s up there.

I stopped in the old mining town of Sainte Marie and then went across the pass to the town of Sainte Dié. St. Dié is actually far enough to the West that it has always been France. The towns all have French-sounding names rather than the German-sounding "burgs" and "heims" and "wihrs"and "willers" of Alsace.

You can also tell the historic boundaries between Alsace and France by the military cemetaries and battlefield monuments. Every time I drive in the Vosges I stumble across a different one.

The intro photo is of the clock face in the tower of the church at St. Dié.

Colmar's Wine Fair

If there is a wine capital in Alsace, it is Colmar. The city sits at the foot of the Vosges in the middle of the most prolific wine villages and has become a hub for marketing and distribution. Knowing that, I was kind of excited when I saw advertisements for the Colmar Foire du Vins (Wine Fair). Posters were plastered all over advertising the exposition and the daily concerts by "big name" bands of local MTV caliber. The Strasbourg wine fair had been a winner back in February. One would expect that this would be a notch or two higher.

Of course, life has its disappointments.

The Colmar Wine Fair was kind of a cross between the farming pavillion at the Indiana State Fair and the Vigo County Home and Garden Show. Lots of agricultural equipment. Lots of people selling lawn ornaments and mattresses and kitchen gadgets. But not a lot of wine. Actually, it was OK. It's just I went in with the wrong expectations. There were lots of cool, shiny stainless steel gadgets for making wine. (Not home brewing, mind you, but on a comercial scale). Lots of bottling lines and fermentation tanks. Tents with people selling corks by the thousands.

This beauty above is for making champagne. Actually, they can't call it champagne in Alsace so they call it cremant instead. Its purpose is to rotate the bottles to get the sediments to fall into the very tip of the neck. Used to be done by monks by hand. Today, you can by this gizmo to avoid the monks.

Finally, the highlight of any fair is the food. What I like about France is that every fair seems to have at least one Oyster Bar, where about 7 euro gets you a plate of oysters, a basket of bread, and a glass of white wine. Below is a photo of the Oyster Bar offerings at Colmar.

The Fête du Munster at Rosheim

The French love their cheese. Charles De Gaule once asked how anyone could be expected to lead a country with over 100,000 different types of cheeses. Each region in France has their own varieties and predjudices as to which cheeses are the best.

In Alsace, the big cheese of all cheeses is Munster. Munster cheese is limited in its production to the villages in the Vosges mountains and in the surrounding valleys. If you've ever changed a baby's diaper, then you know the smell of Munster cheese. Luckily, the taste is much milder than the smell.

The village of Rosheim is familiar to us - we pass through it every time we drive up to Mont Sainte Odile. It is another one of the quaint little Alsatian villages with flowers and half-timbered houses and the remnants of the old walls from its days as a fortified city. (As an indication of age, the doorway below is dated 1608.)Rosheim is also a big producer of Munster cheese. This fact, of course, calls for a festival in honor of the smelly stuff.

The Fête du Munster at Rosheim is actually a benefit on behalf of the local fire department. They put up some tents and sell beer and wine and local foods prepared with Munster. They also put up a grandstand and thrill the crowds with traditional Alsatian music and dancing. The picture below gives an indication of the glamour associated with this event. This is the headline band.You have to admit, the band shown above just screams "cheese festival".

The chef was a colorful character with moustaches that you could hang your laundry on. And the man could cook. The air was thick with the smell of potatoes and pot roast and pizzas made with Munster. (Which is something like saying it smelled like a hog farm.) Finally, there was the traditional Alsatian dancing. Pictures below show first the older group, and then the younger group that is carrying on the tradition.

The thing that I love about this last picture is that there is only one boy and all the rest are girls. Youth dance groups are the same around the world. Whether it's Alsatian dance or Irish dance or YMCA ballet, there is always one poor boy amongst all the girls.

The Canicule Breaks

OK.....all of my complaining about the heat is ancient history now. Since the first of the month the weather has been more like November than August. There is rain almost every day - sometimes all day long. The temperature has been in the 60s and maybe the low 70s. On Sunday the 13th, the high temperature never got out of the 50s. The low, I swear, was in the 40s.

Over the past two weeks I've seen people in the Vosges mountains wearing winter coats. A friend who was planning to motorcycle in Switzerland had to change his vacation plans because it was snowing at elevations over 2000 meters.

Funny how things can change. In July we (French and US alike) complained about the heat each day. No one talks of the canicule anymore. Now, we all complain about the cold and the rain.

Deep Thoughts on Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning

My father worked for 40 years or so as an engineer who specialized in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. His speciality was to take old buildings - hospitals and schools and such - and find a way to make them comfortably warm in the winter and comfortably cool in the summer. With this expertise in the US, he was able to earn a respectable living and to keep his family from going hungry and keep a roof over our heads.

In Europe, I think he could become a millionaire ten times over.

July was hot and there were few places to go for relief. The problem was not that the heat was breaking records - it wasn't. (In fact, the high 80s to mid 90s were not near as bad as the humid summers I remember from my teen years in Indiana.) The problem was not that buildings lack air conditioning (though most homes have no AC, most public buildings do). The problem is that, near as I can tell, no one in France knows how to size a cooling unit to fit the heat load. Couldn't do it if their life depended upon it.

If you go to a theater it is cooler than outside, but the air is stale and in the mid 80s. If you go to a store, it is the same. If you ride the tram, it is the same. (Actually, it is worse because you get the steamy aroma of body odor.) Our offices are portable buildings that heat up like a hay loft when the sun shines. I am serious, they get about as hot as a hay loft because the installed-after-the-fact air conditioning kicks off when the sun shines on it.

Of course, in the winter, it is the same problem in reverse. Nothing ever really gets warm. People layer on the sweaters in both home and office.

Part of it, I have to admit, is that we middle-class Americans have become spoiled. The locals think it natural to dress in layers that can be peeled off or put on as the temperature changes during the day. They are also tougher than we are. I have gone to meetings where the conference room is 100 degrees, I swear. The locals toss of a comment about how hot it is, and then they plow right on with the meeting for an hour and a half. In the U.S., we would have had to cancel the meeting out of health concerns.

I suppose that the tepid air-conditioning is more environmentally responsible. I suppose by sleeping with the windows open at night and the fan blowing on high we are reducing our carbon footprint and saving the earth. If nothing else, we are learning to sweat again.

Knowing that one is spoiled does not change the fact. I miss my 72 degrees +/- 2 year-round climate control.

The Ladies Depart

On Tuesday, August 1, it was time for the ladies to head back home. It was nice to have them and their visit was too soon over. I can't help but wonder what Katy and Zoe thought of the whole thing. What will they remember most about this trip? Will it be the food or the cathedrals or the palaces or the mountains or the half-timbered houses? Somehow, I suspect what they will remember longest will be their exposure to the German language and that word from the highway signs that became their favorite.

Ausfahrt.

The Ladies Tour the Town

We spent the rest of the afternoon touring Strasbourg. We did part on foot, and then we took the boat tour that circles the island via the river. Following are a few pictures of from the day.
As a side note: on Sunday evening, on the return from Luzerne, we stopped off in Colmar for an evening meal. The city center of Colmar contains block after block of the old half-timbered houses that one associates with Alsace. The preservation there is almost perfect, in large part because Colmar escaped the destruction that Strasbourg experienced - first due to shelling in the Franco-Prussian war and then due to allied bombing during WWII. Though some of the tourist books rate Colmar as more picturesque, I still prefer Strasbourg because of the variety of architecture that has resulted from the rebuilding.

The most modern can be found in the facilities of the European Union, which is headquartered in Strasbourg. The photo below is of the European Parliament taken from the river boat.

The Cathedral Clock With the Ladies

Monday, July 31 was the last full day in France for Jenny, Eileen, Katy, and Zoe. After having travelled across Germany, France, and Switzerland they reserved this last day for a leisurely tour of Strasbourg.

We started the day at the Cathedral, for the daily spectacle of the Astronomical Clock. The clock does it's big show when it rings Noon, which occurs every day at 12:15. (Evidently, they didn't have standard time zones back in the day when the clock was built.) To watch the clock do its thing, you have to stand in line for a ticket and then stake out a vantage point. Theresa is the old pro at this, and bless her for standing in the hot sun to get tickets. We watched the clock do its thing, which was anticlimactic by that time.

To fill out this post, I leave you with a few photos from inside the cathedral. The first below is the "pillar of angels", which stands near the astronomical clock in the south nave. Legend has it that the devil came riding on the wind one night to check out the newly built church. He went inside and became trapped by the angels in this pillar. Since that day, they say, the breezes always blow strong in the square outside the cathedral, because the wind is still waiting for the devil to come back out.
Finally, being a stained-glass freak, I leave you with a photo of the grand rosette in the facade, and a random window from the North wall.

A Visit to Luzerne With the Ladies: Part Deux

When we last heard from our intrepid travelers, they were walking along Luzerne's river banks toward the old city walls behind the town. Way back in the day, the city fathers build a high wall on the high hills just behind the town. The thought was that the lake would provide protection to the South and the wall would provide protection to the North. Whether it kept people away back then, I don't know. But today it only serves to draw the tourists . Tourists want to climb anything that is high enough to provide a Kodak moment.

The citizens guarding the walls in those days must have been tough old birds, because it is quite a climb to go up the hill (first) and then up the towers to the top of the wall. Theresa, Gabi, and Irma passed on the climb and instead went to a Starbucks Coffee shop to wait for us. The remaining ladies and I trudged on up.

The view from up there is beautiful. (This is good, because I thought that it was the last thing I would ever see before the heart attack took me away.) Getting there was a bit tough. An OSHA inspector would fine the Swiss government out of existence for the stairways alone. The steps up the wall towers were narrow and steep and uneven. But once on top of the wall, all was forgotten.The picture above shows the ladies on top of the wall. You can barely make out one of the towers in the background behind the trees. The intro picture and the following one are views of the lake from the top. The scenery was very nice. Even nicer was the cool breeze that came across the top of the wall.

A Visit to Luzerne With the Ladies

The ladies returned from Paris on Saturday night, which would be July 29 I believe. With no pause for rest whatsoever, they got up early the next morning for a trip down south to Luzerne, Switzerland. On this day, we took two cars as Gabi and her mom, Irma, came with us. Theresa, Gabi, and I had been to Luzerne before during the wintertime. This was a chance to take Irma, and the Ladies, and to see the city again in the summertime.

Luzerne is a beautiful city any time of year. It is situated on the shores of a lake in the Swiss Alps. The mountains rise up all around the lake, with the tallest, Mount Pilatus, sitting directly south of the city. If you plan your trip well, you can take a boat across the lake and then take a cog railway all the way up to the peak of Mt. Pilatus. But of course I was in charge of planning, and I never plan that well.
We arrived in the city right at lunch time and decided to get something to eat on an old paddle-wheeler that is anchored and serves as a restaurant. The servers were pretty amazing in that they could speak both English (for the Webers/Randazzos) and Spanish (for the Vegas). They could also have done German, French, or Italian...but that would have been showing off. The servers only had trouble translating one of the dishes from the German menu. They couldn't think of the English word. Finally, they just pointed to one of the ducks swimming on the lake and said "one of those things".

Picture below is the gang waiting on appetizers to come. After lunch, we took a walk through town and crossed over the old wooden bridge. You see, Luzerne is positioned where the lake spills over to form the river Reuss. The wooden bridge spans the neck of the river. From the bridge you can check out the ducks and the geese and the fish. The mountain water is so clear that you can see the fish swimming 5 or 10 feet down. The intro picture shows the group on the old bridge. The picture below gives a better view of the bridge itself.Of course, the banks of the river/lake are lined with quaint old buildings. You have to have something to draw the tourists. We took a walk along the banks toward the old city walls that sit behind the old town.

The Ladies in Lighter Moments

Just a few photos to show that even hard-core tourists have a laugh now and then.

The intro photo is of my sister Eileen and niece Zoe posing beside a statue at Versailles of Napolean in the buff. You have to ask them why they happen to be laughing.

The photo below shows my sister Jenny in the bathroom of the Paris hotel room. I'm told that it if you weren't claustrophobic before, then you would be after using it.Finally, the picture below was taken in one of the mirrors at Versailles. Theresa is especially proud of her cleverness in taking this one.