This year I spent this time of the year in Alsace. A perfect place for good food and good wine. We mainly followed the wine-route, but had some important deviations. First we stopped at the Maginot Line Memorial. Certainly a world war relic worth the five minutes we spent there. It brought up the issues of what the mysterious Limozins were doing there.Our next stop - Restaurant "Trout" in Illhausern. A mouth watering cuisine (we tried the asparagus and the trout), a charming view of the "L'ill" stream and warm sunshine added to the charm of the place. After a short stop at a few more places, we finally reached the "wine-route".
A few things stand out from the quite packed two days- other than the food and wine. The first
being the timber houses - quite like the "fachwerk" houses in Germany. But most of them were multi-coloured and had quite some intricate sculptures on the wood adding to the beauty of the villages. The next were the storks - the symbol of Alsace. We crossed a natural park abounding in Storks. They flew over our car in their quest for materials for their nests. The sight of storks building nests on top of public towers/gates or houses seems quite common in this area. The real storks were definitely a million times more interesting than the soft-toy storks that every shop in every village seemed to stock. The third thing that I found quite unique was the bakery selling "pain ancienne" (sorry for my french). They had (usual) different bread varities - olive, nuts, whole- grain etc. The unique thing about the bread was that they were about 2 m long - yes you read me right - 2m! Atleast thats how long they were at the end of the day - I wonder if they started the day being longer. The breadth was probably marginally bigger than usual and they cut the bread side ways and not lengthwise. The bread was really good as well - a nice fuse of german and french bread that I am familiar with. A personal first was seeing a "stage coach". Another nice feature was that every one we met were extremely friendly. They had no problems communicating with us in our broken french or german or sometimes even english!! We did miss out on the beautiful lakes but the plenty of streams made up for it. And the food and wine - but thats for another post. Hopefully a year wont go by :)
