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| “Petit Venice, Colmar” – or if you can’t see an image, “crap WiFi in Nancy“ |
Home day yesterday. We wanted to wander the small town of Riquewihr, understand a little of the history, check out the art gallery and taste some wines. Unfortunately we started with the wine tasting.
Today we packed at a leisurely pace, cabbed it the short haul to Colmar airport to pick up the hire car, then headed into the old part of town. The taxi driver was a hoot, didn’t stop smashing out million-words-a-minute French from when he picked us up to when he dropped us off. Judging from his silouette, he was still talking as he drove off down the highway. Amongst other things we picked up that it had snowed yesterday somewhere up in the Vosges – when we found a place to park in town at say 10:00am, I reckon it was about 9 degrees (while we were in Paris it was 31!).
Old Colmar is very nice if a little touristy. Lots of trinket stores selling T-towels and fridge magnets, but also the beautiful old timber and stone buildings. Apparently the buildings used to be all timber and they were portable (portable in the 3-bullocks-per-beam kind of way). There are little roman numerals carved at each end to show how to put them back together again – big mecano sets basically. Louis the 14th, the sun king, ordered the houses be rendered because he didn’t want to be reminded of the Germanic peoples.
We vowed we weren’t going to do a gondola ride in little Venice but it looked like fun so we did it anyway. It turned out to be something of a highlight, the gondola driver was a young archaeologist student (brown corduroy jacket with elbow patches, a long stringy goatee, and halfmoon-Lennon glasses) who was very passionate and very knowledgeable. Plus he said everything twice; English & French was got to learn a few new words too. Today the canal is crystal clear and stocked with trout. When the nights of St John were here during the Crusades, it was a sign of power to have your bathroom over-hanging the stream, which, as a consequence, was full of shit.
We drove to the Turckheim cellar (cave) one of the third most well known wine cooperatives in France, and purchased some medicinal stores for the barge; pinot gris, pinot noir, a rose and two of their Crement (the local version of champagne). They’re really good wines and really cheap – and since we walked through most of the vineyards they came from – they’ll taste even better!
Nice drive West over the Vosges back through a couple of the towns we walked through (Ammershwihr and Kaysersberg). It was nice to approach these villages from below and see the “balons” looming up behind. Very Swiss looking; steep green pastured hills lined with trees covered in black and white cows. Easy drive to Nancy where we’re staying a couple of nights. A quick recon after dinner showed that it will be fun to explore.
PS on telly tonight they were covering the Far left wing riots (apparently a bit of a May day tradition). At one point on the bottom of the screen news scroll it said, “the riots were not caused because the Australian prime minister did not get into his aeroplane.” Phew! Good to know.