Paris & Alsace Untours, Spring 2001
by Joan Haines, Woodbury, CT
April in Paris! Yes, and we arrived there on Saturday, April 28th, the chestnuts were surely in blossom everywhere we looked, the air was mild and the sun shone! It was good to have four days in the City of Light as a prelude to our ninth Untour to Alsace, and we really enjoyed them, riding the subway and walking everywhere from our pied-a-terre at the Hotel de la Bretonnerie behind the vast Hotel de Ville. Idyll made our reservations at this small and charming hotel where we had our croissants and coffee every morning in the cellar-breakfast room.It is on a narrow street in the Marais quartier - full of famous old mansions, with the Place des Vosges within walking distance. This is the oldest square in Paris, named after the mountain area next on our itinerary! What a beautiful square, lined with linden trees and thirty-six houses with identical facades on its four sides - with pavilions for the King and Queen to the South and North. The area around it is known for its leather work and also for a large Jewish population, with the characteristic shops and businesses that both bring to it. In two of the huge mansions is the excellent Museum Carnavalet with collections telling the history of Paris from its earliest days up to the twentieth century.
We went to the wonderful Rodin Museum, in a house where he had lived at the end of his life. Inside are paintings and drawings, as well as sculptures, and outside there are even more, in beautifully tended gardens. Another Museum we enjoyed was the Marmotan, out by the Ranelagh Gardens, with a wonderful collection of Monet works and of Paul Signac, a less familiar but very impressive painter. The third gallery we loved was the Musee Jacquemart-André, in the Faubourg area. It is in an elegant house from the late 19th century, with great paintings from the Italian and European Renaissance. It has a fine restaurant in a huge salon with ceilings and frescoes by Tiepolo et al. What a lovely place to eat among the exhibits!
Of course we went to Notre-Dame, to Les Invalides, to the Bazaar de l’Hotel de Ville to eat lunch on the roof garden at Galleries Lafayette, to see great views of the city. It must be our 6th visit to Paris, but it never fails to enchant us. We hate to leave!
We flew to Mulhause/Basel on Wednesday, May 4, to begin Idyll’s new Alsace Adventure. Vivienne met us at the airport, along with about 16 other Untourists, and whisked us off in a very comfy bus to the Relais du Haut Koenigsbourg, above St. Hyppolyte, about an hour and a quarter’s run on the fast road. She talked all the way, with her enthusiastic, vivacious manner, and a trace of her ‘home’ accent of Springfield, Moss. She is clearly going to be a great asset to Idyll on all counts, as she is also a certified tour guide, having trained and passed all exams.
At the lovely Relais - a hotel/restaurant halfway up the Koenigsbourg mountain we found Sonya, our hostess/landlady, and our zippy little Renault car, and shot off down the hill, in the latter, behind the former, to the tiny village of Zellenberg. As it has for several hundred years, it sits in a rosy sandstone glow, on a hill in the midst of thousands of acres of vineyards, which are now all just beginning to show little points of green in the sunshine. It boasts some 400 residents, 2 restaurants, one church, one fountain, one stork’s nest and - no shops! Our home was right on the square, with wistaria around the doors, green shutters and three locks to the door which are all locked at night! (Only two in the daytime!)
Sonya understands a lot of English. and speaks better than she gives herself credit for. She made us very welcome, showed us all the pointers of our home, which is a gite at other times of year, and left us to it! We were delighted with the panoramic views from our two bedrooms, and intrigued by the decor which she and Uwe, her husband, have devised for the living and open kitchen quarters, whose daylight comes from the bedrooms beyond. Maybe 200 years ago, wine was stored and sold from this interior area, opening onto the street.
The rest of the day we spent exploring our apartment and unpacking, with many gazes out of our bedroom windows, across the beautiful Alsace plain. We knew that the Rhine was just a few miles to our East, and that the mountains just visible through the haze were, indeed, in Germany and were those of the Black Forest. To our West, of course, were the Vosges and the Lorraine region -also an inviting prospect. We went a few kilometers north to Ribeauville, a wine town of about 5,000 people, with much to attract tourists and Untourists alike: charming shops up the old main street, 16 and 17C half-timbered houses, many wine shops, towers at both top and bottom of the town, and storks nesting on two ‘high-spots’! (One appeared often on the parking lot south of the town to hunt for ‘goodies’ for the nestling whose head appeared above the nest from time to time!) We were happy to find a shop to which we came daily as we fared forth, to buy the International Herald Tribune, and a big supermarket on the outskirts with the cheapest (?) gas in the area. We did a small ‘shop’ that first day, to augment Sonya’s good provisions, ate and relaxed!
Thursday, in good Idyll tradition, we returned to the Relais for orientation. The group met in a large conference room, and Vivienne, with her colleague Marguerite, briefed us on all the do’s and don’ts and special things about Alsace, including a little history, e.g. 4 times under German rule in the last century! Marguerite is quite a personality - a professional actress well-known on TV for her portrayal of Alsatian culture and characters. She has minimal English but smiles and chatters on in her musical voice, and is actually a mine of information, especially for those interested in restaurants! She also hosts 3 apartments in her home in nearby Bergheim.
We all stayed for lunch and ate a typical meal on the terrace. Choucroute garnie is very popular: sauerkraut topped with sausages and other meats, or fish, including delicious salmon. During the next two weeks, we were to make the acquaintance of tarte flambee, like a thin pizza crust with a special white sauce, cheese, onions and lardons of bacon et al., and tarte a l’oignon, with a thicker crust and delicious onions in a baked egg custard, along with veal and pork cutlets, both rather like schnitzels.
Then we were on our own and the sun shone for us! We explored many of the small villages on the Route des Vins, with half-timbering, tower-gates, rosy sand-stone churches and town halls, gardens at every possible corner, and planters newly-filled with flowers in every main street. Wine shops and wine tasting are everywhere, And ‘salons de the’, with wonderful pastries - especially strawberry tarts! The shops open around 10, and close at twelve for 2 or 3 hours, when everyone goes home to eat and the visitors choose a restaurant from among the many! We ate our main meal at noon, and had excellent and reasonably priced meals. Like Ruth Reichl, we made good use of our little plastic bags and often brought home the makings of a supper sandwich, along with a fruit tart, eclair or mille feuille.
It is hard to keep the villages and small towns straight, with names like Bergheim, Beblenheim, Eguisheim, and Turckheim, or Bennwihr, Riquewihr and Hunawihr, all on or close to the Wine Route, but they are all old ‘at heart’, with more modem houses, shops and often plants and light industry round the perimeter. This was equally true, and of course more noticeable with the larger towns like Selestat (30 thousand plus), Colmar (84 thousand) and Strasbourg (close to 400 thousand), making the antiquity of the centers even more appealing.
Kaysersberg is a very attractive town, on the river Weiss, and the place where the Tokay grapes from Hungary were first grown in the late 16th century. It has a good market, with flowers, fruits and vegetables as well as dry goods - and many shoppers. It was extra meaningful to me because it is the birthplace of Albert Schweitzer, who was one of my father’s lifelong heroes. His father was a minister there at the time of his birth. The museum in the family’s home is simple, full of photographs, letters and memorabilia from his life in Lamborene. We learned that Schweitzer’s one child - a daughter, now 82 - lives in the US, in Georgia, and still visits both this town and the hospital in Lamborene, where her parents are buried. Somehow this touched me very much. I came home to look up a book of his writings called “Music in the Life of Albert Schweitzer”, and to find - and play - some tapes of Bach organ works, which he recorded in London in the early thirties! Both these were gifts from my father in 1953!
Ste-Marie-aux-Mines, in the mountains behind Ribeauville, also added to its charm with several surprises! In the Vosges mountains were once rich silver and copper mines, now of interest to rockhounds and ‘fossillers’ from around the world, with a huge annual event. Erich Jacob, at the Information Bureau, told us much about them in his excellent English, and went on to talk about the history of fabric weaving in the town - by no means a dead art, but still sought out by the haute couturiers of Paris. (There is even a place to buy, open one afternoon a week to tourists!) Both these topics can be followed up in a small museum on the main street. Erich’s last topic was the art/craft of quilting. It originally started here with the arrival of the Anabaptists, Protestants from Northern Europe seeking religious freedom. It seems that Ste Marie became a quilting center’ before the Amish (Mennonites-Hutterites) left for the New World, where they quilt today in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and from whence they come once a year to a great quilting festival in this small town! Erich let me take pictures of some of the winning quilts in the Bureau office! What a nice young man!
Our day driving in the Vosges and through the valleys into Lorraine turned into a minor adventure by afternoon. After the lovely morning views of forests and valleys and farms, it first became rainy, and very quickly, FOGGY! Visibility was down to a few feet as we skirted high pastures, ski-areas, towns and eating places, in the mountain roads around St. Die. St Deodat is known as the home of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci. In 1507, in a work titled ‘Cosmographiae Introductio’, a team of scientists gave his name to the newly discovered continent: America!! Next onward to the Col de Bonhomme and Col de la Schlucht, along the Route des Cretes, between 10 and 11 thousand feet. We soldiered on, feeling the mystery of these historic mountains where battles were fought in centuries past, as well as in recent times!
By contrast, we took two drives into Germany, driving across the Rhine without a pause at Neuf-Brisach and on first to Freiburg. This is a University city - 10% of its population are students, so, despite its ‘old center’ and historic sights, it has the feel of a modern town, full of vitality, with lots of shops and a big open market around ifs beautiful, soaring cathedral. Nothing here closes at noon for 2 hours! People eat ‘on the hoof’, with their sandwiches emerging from the paper wrappers as they stride along, chewing away! After a good look around, and a meal, we took a route to the East, and blazed our own trail to Kirchzarten, through the hills and valleys to Todtnau and then on the hairpin roads to Aitern, Obermulten and St Trudpert, via Munstertal.
Here we found a huge abbey church, in a quiet vale, bustling with activity, with a convent or monastery attached and busloads of ‘pilgrims’ visiting this place. Uwe didn’t know of it, and so far we haven’t found out morel We returned via Breisach, on the German side of the river, where we climbed up to the old church for lovely views, and some beautiful frescoes by Martin Schongauer, whose oil painting we saw in Golmar - The Virgin and the Rose Bower. These larger frescoes date from late 16th century. Driving home from here we passed through Marckolsheim, where the Maginot line memorial stands. It is strange to recall those days in England in1940, when we waited for the Line to fall to the German advance. Actually, it never did, since it was bypassed by the tanks invading from Belgium. On our second trip into the Black Forest we followed the route suggested by Idyll, and enjoyed it too, but felt the way we traveled first was even more lovely and further into the mountains. The valleys are so wide and inviting.
Colmar was the first city we visited, and we returned there two or three times. It is less than a half-hour from Zellenberg and one can use different routes to and fro. Here are my notes from our first visit: Great day, sunny and breezy. Off to Colmar. Found Vivienne’s free parking, walked into ‘old town’ through shopping area with Monoprix store! It’s easy to get around in and so lovely - old, old buildings in excellent shape and proudly kept. Streets of flowers, waterways, church of St Martin has beautiful vaulting, 13th century Musee d’Unterlinden, in a 13th century convent, has great wealth of religious art, plus the only Holbein in France and the first acknowledged still-life painting! Highpoint: the Issenheim Altarpiece, by Grunewald. Too complex to describe, or photograph, a postcard must suffice! A docent there took me under her wing and escorted me to each part of the exhibit, telling me, in French I could understand, the story of the plague of ergotism, a disease transmitted through a fungus in bad rye flour, and St Anthony’s role in its cure, through a better diet! (I think I have that right!)
We came back again to see the beautiful home of Bartholdi, designer of the Statue of Liberty, and the Dominican Church, home to the exquisite painting Virgin of the Rose Bower, painted by Schongauer in 1473, since its return to Colmar after being stolen and spending a year ‘in hiding’, I believe, in Germany. The flowers and birds on a gold background sound a happy note amid the austerity of mediaeval architecture. The area of Petite Venise is a charming district, with well-maintained and colorful houses along the river bank, also full of flowers...and of course we browsed in the Monoprix store - though it couldn’t hold a candle to Corn - a huge shopping center out in the industrial zone!
Having crossed its vast parking lot we went in to this one-story bare structured building to find a long colonnade of ‘boutiques’ of many kinds, around the edges of the structure, accessible only from the inside, and with flower/plant arrangements every now and then, with a fish pond or aviary or animal figures in some of them. The roof let in real daylight and the whole effect was light and cheerful. Then the whole center area was given over to one vast supermarket: foods of all kinds, clothing, toys, a gardening center - anything you could desire - like a Home Depot/Target/Costco rolled into one place! It was really amazing - and about five minutes from the antiquities of the city of Colmarl
North from Colmar is the town of Selestat, much smaller, about 16,000. While it is now pretty much an industrial center, it was a big center for the Humanist movement of the 15 and l6th centuries, stemming from the meeting of a native son, Martin Bucer, with Martin Luther in 1518. The Humanist Library bears witness to this, combining several great libraries of classical and Humanist manuscripts. One could pore over these for hours. The illuminated capitals from the MiddleAges are exquisite, and equally fascinating are the exercise books of the students in the Latin and Humanist schools of the day. Selestat has two beautiful churches, one Romanesque and one Gothic. And just a few kilometers away is the Abbey of Ebersmunster, which is the finest example of Baroque art of the early 18th century! How wonderful to see these three on the same day!
Strasbourg, now close to 400 thousand, has a famous University, a bustling port on the river Ill, and a cathedral that is simply breathtaking! It is vast, just vast, and it is set down in the midst of this city where daily life swirls around its very doors, so that one is absolutely dominated by its Romanesque power. We came to it on Sunday and were in time for a Mass, which was just beginning. There were many worshipers who obviously knew the liturgy and joined in when the leader gave a beckoning gesture. She was robed and stood at the lectern, modeling the antiphons and singing what I took to be the psalms. The homily was in French, but some of the prayers were in English. We were happy to be there and to hear the great organ ‘roar’, even though we did miss the performance by the Astronomical Clock! We enjoyed walking to La Petite France area, with the old houses and shops clustered along the canal side, and good views of a stork’s nest ‘en haut’. The Rohan Musee des Beaux Arts had a good collection and was in part of a huge palace built for an 18th century cardinal. Strasbourg would repay more time than we spent there! (I noticed the very different roof style of many of the big old houses - like steps going up and narrowing as they go -there’s a name for this, is it mansard?)
All 20 Idyllers joined in a splendid winetasting at the Sipp Winery in nearby Hunawihr. The famille Sipp was represented by Lara, from California.and her engaging and amusing husband, Jacques. We enjoyed 3 lovely wines, and saw both old and new ways of making them on our tour. There were some fascinating procedures described to us, from the shaping of the vines to encourage maximum production of grapes, to the way machines help in the preparation of the sparkling wines - including freezing the neck of the bottle, knocking the cap off, allowing the ‘plug’ to shoot out, carrying the yeast and waste product of the fermentation, and the speedy re-corking of the bottles! From there we returned to the Relais, to meet up with Vivienne, Marguerite and also Carla, newly arrived from Media, PA, to visit our apartments and look for more! We had a long and delicious dinner as guests of Idyll, including an entree of choucroute with salmon - very good!
The Jaeger family had been working on their garden terrace throughout our stay, and we were invited for an aperitif on our last Sunday morning. The sun shone, Jeremie and Leonore were out playing and Uwe and Sonya gave us the lovely sparkling wine of Alsace, Cremant, as it is called, since the word ‘champagne’ is not allowed in this region, accompanied by Kugelhof, ‘a delightful puff of flour, butter, eggs, raisins and almonds’, all very good! We had taken small gifts for the children and it was fun to watch them open them at their play. Ulwe and Sonya are really sweet people, open and spontaneous and warmly hospitable. We really enjoyed them and the creative way they have used their home to make it practical and appealing at the same time. Sonya has an artistic talent, no doubt. We appreciated that - and the flowers that made us welcome, as much as we appreciated the quietest dishwasher we have ever used, and the brand new oven and clothes washer - which we didn’t!
We left at 6.a.m. on our last morning, taking the fast road to Mulhouse/Basel Airport. We found no gas on the way, so had to leave the tank half-empty! Doubtless that will catch up with Idyll and us too! And we had to tote our bags from the unmanned drop-off through major construction work to the departure terminal. This didn’t daunt us, as we travel very light - one small wheel-on apiece, and we alerted Idyll to inform future Untourists about these small tediums. Nothing could mar the pleasure and interest of the past two weeks! The storks of Alsace certainly brought us good luck and sunshine!
P.S. The roads are very well-signed, with excellent surfaces. French drivers were speedy but courteous and law-abiding. Saw only 2 ‘cowboys’ and only one accident.
Also, I meant to include the fascinating Spindler Marqueterie Studio. Go past Boersch to Saint Leonard. Not easy to find.