What do you get when you cross a Frenchman and a German?

We left Switzerland on Tuesday and headed back to France, to the little town of Bergheim in Alsace where one of my former MTC work colleagues, Penny, is now living with her partner Paul. The Alsace region is full of low rolling hillsides chockers with vines. The diverse ownership of land and the hunt for the best terroir means that the plots run in all sorts of directions making for a pretty patchwork of vineyards

This church features on the cover of the current Lonely Planet France
Even the church gets in on the wine action - note the hand on the clock

Bergheim is on the very touristy Route du Vin (road of wine) but is fortunately spared from being a town people stop to visit. This is surprising as it is very beautiful, but good news for residents, and we very much enjoyed walking around the remaining sections of the medieval town walls.

Penny and David

Colourful houses in Bergheim


Penny has 2 black cats, Plum and Hibou. Whilst both are individually lovely, Plum has taken an intense dislike to Hibou for reasons that were unknown to us at the time of the visit. Plum would hiss at Hibou if he got too close, which of course made for an interesting night’s sleep given that both cats took up residence on our bed for the night. All was fine once Plum had secured the spot in the middle of the bed (clearly the plum spot). Penny had been consulting with a vet over Plum’s behaviour and had been asked to supply a photo of Plum. This weird request piqued Penny’s curiosity and we all joked that it sounded a bit hippy/new age. Turns out we were spot on. Penny went back for a consultation (without Plum) and was told that Plum is hypersensitive to energies beyond human comprehension but which concern some threat to Penny or Paul and that Plum is stressing out as she is failing in her mission to protect them because they aren’t understanding the problem and helping her to help them. As this is all just too hilarious, Penny has green lighted some more channelling to dig a bit further.
Plum - Is that ear a psychic antenna?

From Bergheim we moved a short distance south into the Munster valley for a week in a cute little cottage in Soultzeren.
Our Cottage

The Munster valley is famous for the smelly cheese of the same name (yumm) and is adjacent to the Alsace wine region. Where there is cheese, there are usually cows as we discovered one day driving through Soultzeren.

Soultzeren

The region is also home to a Stork population. Almost extinct in this area a few years ago, the storks have now recovered thanks to proactive assistance with nesting sites.
Note stork nest on top of building

Armed with excellent advice from Paul and Penny we ventured into the major town in the region, Colmar, and stocked up on great local whites. After living in catered accommodation for the past few months we were very keen to cook and relax “at home” for the week. We shopped at the small but high quality farmers market in Munster.
Colmar
Market at Munster
Munster

One day we drove up to Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace. The region has a fascinating history. Strasbourg was for a long time an independent free city state in the Holy Roman Empire (but largely influenced by the Germanic states). Sitting on the Rhine River, it is practically at the centre of Europe and thus was a major trading town with an excellent strategic position. In the late 1600’s they must have exercised a little too much strategy and the French decided to invade to rid themselves of this independent annoyance. For the next 200 years the French integrated Alsace into France, but in 1870 when the French provoked a war with Germany, they were humiliated and part of the terms of peace was the ceding of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany. The Germans then set about re-Germanifying Alsace, however at the end of the 1st world war the French took their revenge and made Germany cede the territories back to France as part of the terms of peace. When Germany whipped France again at the start of the 2nd World War, they declared Alsace and Lorraine again part of Germany and made Alsatian men join the German army. That little venture lasted 5 years and the French regained Alsace at the end of the WW2.
This is covered in great detail at the Strasbourg city museum, but unfortunately they haven’t finished it yet and it only covers up to 1870.

Strasbourg Cathedral looms over everything

A bit further south there is the unloved town of Mulhouse, an industrial town that is home to the Peugeot factory. However it is also home to two fantastic museums.

The first is the Cite de l’Automobile – Schlumpf Collection. This was a collection started by a textile industrialist Fritz Schlumpf. It is a collection of over 400 cars starting with the very first mass produced car in 1894 (a run of 6 cars) all the way through to today. The collection is biased towards French cars (Bugattis in particular), but also includes the best English and German cars. The story of the collection is fascinating and sad. Fritz became rich from his textiles business, but in secret started spending the profits on his car obsession. At one point he closed one of his mills to convert it onto an opulent space to house his collection (where it still is today) and he had 40 people on staff working full time restoring the cars (sworn to secrecy). His neglect of the textile business led to it being closed in 1976 and he fled to Switzerland. His factory staff were so enraged that Fritz had thrown their livelihood away that they stormed the off-limits mill and discovered his amazing car collection. They occupied the building for the next 2 years, and when creditors of the mill threatened to sell off the collection, it was nationalised.

The second museum was the Cite du Train. Set in 2 enormous buildings it covered the history of French rail including the role of rail in all the European wars. We had spent so long at the car museum that we felt like we sprinted through this place. We really liked the Presidential trains and the first class carriages from the 1920’s & 30’s.

We will publish a separate photo gallery with shots of my favourite cars and trains from these museums.

As previously reported we also did a day trip up to the Frankfurt Motor Show (see earlier posting for full report).

The area around Munster was keenly contested in the first 6 months of WWI. When hostilities broke out, the French drove into Alsace in a pique of nationalist pride, but quickly realised that they couldn’t hold the territory. They retreated into the hills to the West (the Vosges) to see out the winter, which gave the Germans time to establish concrete re-inforced trenches. After a few battles the hills became a trench war stalemate. The area became known as “Le Ligne”, and we visited the memorial park that gives you a full account from both the French and German sides, and allows you to walk through the French and German trenches.

German trench - see large concrete fortification
Map of the trenches at Le ligne

We had Penny and Paul over for dinner one night. I wanted to cook some of my standards but did not have my recipes with me. However the internet was able to provide me with a bewildering variety of recipes on similar themes. My clafoutis with fresh raspberries and cherries was my best clafoutis ever. David also managed to pull together his broccoli and potato soup without the use of a blender. In the future we are going to adopt the ‘’boil to buggery’’ method of soup preparation more often.

Next time: Paris & coming home