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| Strasbourg Cathedral |
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| Cleaned stained glass windows |
Today we headed back to France, and crossed the border in the middle of the bridge over the Rhein. It was lovely being back in France. As soon as we had parked the car and started to walk to the city centre we were flooded with options for bakeries so stopped at the first for our first decent coffee in a while, and gooey custard pastries (our favourites). Not far to see the impressive Strasbourg cathedral. Last time in 1982 a large part of it was stored inside a covered bridge we walked through, but it is back to being complete, but oddly they didn’t take the opportunity to clean it so it remains a grubby reddish-grey colour. Nevertheless it is a very impressive piece of Gothic architecture. The inside was just as impressive, and the newly cleaned windows were lovely. There’s also an amazing ancient and enormous astrological clock – seems a bit out of place in a cathedral. One fun thing was the 1600 graffiti – it’s not a new problem.
A wander along the river brought us to the superb half-timbered houses Strasbourg is known for. Stupidly, I was short on battery power on my camera, and had neglected to charge the spare overnight, so had to be a little frugal for a bit. The sights are pretty special here, and well worth the trip from Freiburg.
On the way out, we tried to do a tour of the Heineken brewery which was on a tourist brochure, but it turned out you needed to make an appointment, and even then it is closed on Mondays anyway, so we missed out on a free beer!
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| Strasbourg |
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| Ancient windows in the main square, Strasbourg |
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| Gengenbach |
We took the scenic route home through part of the Black Forest, although the GPS seemed to give us a little trouble as directions were not always perfectly clear. First town was Gengenbach, quite small but perfectly formed. The neatness and tidiness was quite noticeable after the more rowdy France. We have found we prefer the more lively and natural French way of doing things, the Germans and even more so the Swiss are just a bit stiff and straight compared, and the towns a bit chocolate boxy. A few dogs and a bit of rubbish and some odd people would soften them nicely!
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| Huge house/barn, Elzach |
After Gengenbach the road took us past a number of towns, and finally as we came near to Freiburg an interesting area of immense house/barns. Presumably each held an extended family, as they are enormous.
On our arrival back into Freiburg, we headed to a bike shop, as Alastair wanted to find out if they had 2nd-hand bikes, also to use their vice to squash the lens surround on his camera which he had dropped, squeezing the surround onto the lens so it didn’t move freely. The bike search proved fruitless, but the camera fix seems to have worked.
