Sunday 5th July – Week 3 – Route Des Vins / Strasbourg

We were up at 8am and had the tent cleaned and packed by 8:30 and were then on the road along the Route Des Vins to Strasbourg. The campground at Ribeauville had been really great, but after two heavy showers, the area around our tent was now very muddy and its original appeal of being well shaded meant that in the dry spells it hadn't dried out at all.

Being a Sunday night tonight, we have decided that this and Monday night will be hotel nights. Tonight will be in Strasbourg, where we have booked the Hotel Gutenburg, right in the centre of town and then Monday night we will be on the Rhine in a tiny little town call Bacharach.

Our route to Strasbourg was on the Route Des Vins, the tourist road that runs from one end of the Alsace to the other. It's actually the road we've been driving up and down for the last couple of days, but I just haven't got around to mentioning it. After all the rain, the day was amazingly crystal clear and we took some great photos of the vineyards and the small towns as we went along. There really is a town every couple of kilometres and in some of the photos, you can see two or three them spanned out towards the horizon. We stopped at the town of Itterswiller, because it in particular caught our eye, with all the houses and hotels having brilliantly colourful window boxes full of geraniums and petunias (Anne told me that).

Our first scheduled stop on the way to Stasbourg, was at the town of Obernai. Parking on the outskirts of town, we did a walking tour of the town and it's very impressive cathedral. There were a myriad of bus tours in town – old people and American school kids, so the place was pretty busy. Being a Sunday of course, there were also a hundred motorbikes in town, with their owners all wading around in their extravagantly hot protective gear. I enjoyed looking at the motorbikes, but couldn't do the 30 odd degree heat with all the gear.

Leaving Obernai, it was on the motorway to Strasbourg. Jane did an excellent job of navigating us straight to the hotel door, or the parking building 50 metres away. Heading out to find some lunch, there was a Romanian Food Festival on in Gutenburg Square, which is right beside the hotel, so we stopped there to see what they could do with minced meat and potato and also to pick up some information about tourism in Romania. The Potato salad and the spiced mince sausages were very nice, as was the Apple Struddle, which had a filling that was almost like cream cheese.

After lunch, we headed to the Strasbourg Cathedral, which is magnificent – both the external facade and the stained glass windows inside. People were climbing up inside the church towers, but given the heat and the recent lunch, we decided that we'd go and check into our hotel and watch the Tour de France (which isn't nearly as good when you've only got French, German or Italian (we did have all three) commentators.

We went for a long walk in the evening, down to Petite France, the canal area of Strasbourg and then along the riverbank of the River Ill doing a big circuit all the way back to the cathedral, before heading back down to Petite France to one of the restaurants we had seen beside the canals. It had the intriguing name of La Corde A Ligne – The Clothes Line and all the menu items were named after things to do with washing, or washing machines. It sounds odd, when translated to English, but the menu itself was pretty cool and we had a meal of Spatzle and meatballs in a mustard sauce (me), and Spatzle and half a chicken (Anne), which we shared.