Onwards & Upwards

Autumn in Alsace

Gateway to the Vosges Mountains

Shantyman was lifted out for the Winter at the end of October,

and so I headed off towards Germany, stopping overnight in an entirely decent little guesthouse just outside of Vesoul, replete with wooden skis on the wall and one of the nattiest shower cubicles I have ever experienced.

https://www.booking.com/hotel/fr/auberge-du-raddon.en-gb.html

All of the best museums in Épinal are closed for refurbishment at the moment, so I soldiered on despite the weather and took a break at the Source of the Moselle, somewhere vaguely north of Belfort.

A bit of an Anticlimax

The Source of the Seine is the real deal, all set out just as it should be (and technically part of Paris).

[embed]The Seine from Sea to Source ♪ And I would walk 500 miles…… ♫theancientmarinersblog.com

Not so the Mighty Moselle, which begins life as a squat toilet, then feeds into a concrete drain. And so on, presumably, all the way to Koblenz. (We shall see next week, when I move to Trier and Cochem).

From here its simply a case of 50 metres further over the crest of the hill and you are into the broad floodplain of the Upper Rhine, with Basel on the right, the Black Forest on the far horizon, and where I was going somewhere over on the left, in the mist. It was a long and fairly uninspiring drive through what claims to be Alsace but is in truth just the flat bit between two far more interesting bits on either side of the river.

Strasbourg

t’s all there, somewhere, but you have to look for it

I found Strasbourg a bit of a let-down, to be honest: maybe the expectation levels were just a tad high, maybe I was tired by the time I arrived, maybe Halloween was just too much for me to handle on a windswept Friday night. Whatever it was, initial impressions were not encouraging:

The next morning, armed with a tourist map, things took a turn for the better, and little by little the city revealed itself

That having been said, it’s really no different from a dozen or more half-timbered Franco-German cities (Rouen and Bremen come to mind) and, quite frankly, no better. Traffic and navigation were an absolute nightmare (trams everywhere), the non-Old Town was reminiscent of central Southampton, and there were a surprisingly large number of beggars, homeless people and flagrant drug users. Not what I had expected. (They even have a Primark, which pretty much seals it, really).

Life can be a Bitche sometimes

So, onwards towards Germany, up through the Northern Vosges National Park, in the pouring rain. All very pleasant if you like hills and trees. And trees and hills. Hills. Trees. And all the Bambi you can eat……

[embed]Parc naturel régional des Vosges du Nord Entre plateau lorrain et plaine d'Alsace, le Parc naturel régional des Vosges du Nord est un territoire forestier…www-parc--vosges--nord-fr.translate.goog

But there’s not a lot else up there until you cross over the slimy grey river Saar and finally get onto a proper toll-free unrestricted Autobahn. Happy Days indeed — the first time my asthmatic Peugeot (a.k.a. „Ferkel”) had managed to limp over 90km/h in several months (you know, downhill and with a following wind).

I was headed for Nowheresville Arizona, up in the Hunsrück between Saarlouis and Trier, where I plan to lie low for a week to recharge my batteries and sort a few things out. And neck one or more beers.