Day Thirty Two: Sarrebourg to Strasbourg: Time flies when you are having fun.: (Year 32: 1999)

October 22, 2017

Flash Back to 1999:

People often develop a deep interest in something and go after it with a lot of energy. I guess this could be as simple as a hobby, but also it can be a whole lifestyle or some type of a cause or quest. Dodie's Mom was a founding member of a great group called the Raging Grannies. They dressed up as even more grannies than they already were, and staged protests in which they sang politically tweaked versions of well known songs. They were unthreatening, and therefore powerful. Dodie's dad too was a Grannies supporter and a great guide to us all.

Hilda and Walter also pursued fervent passions. Hilda (second from right) was a founder of the political protest group "Raging Grannies", and Hilda and Walter handed out anti-war pamphlets on street corners in Victoria. Nuclear proliferation was (and is!) a major concern.

Walter remained our guide. He had survived the War with a practical perseverance that spread to us for overcoming whatever adversities.

Meanwhile we were taking up the blander activity of long distance running. The runs however were also often for worthy causes, and spawned a lot of positive group feeling.

Now being over 50 years old we must have felt a need to ward off aging. We started a (fairly brief) 10 km running career. Our kids could easily outrun us, with no training, but like the tortoise and the hare, would not always cross the finish line first. In the photo, Steve and Laurie are fooling around, but Dodie is the winner!

Unlike Stewball, Dodie never actually won a race, but she beat us!

And finally, there was star trek. Being a Trekkie is a well known obsession!

Although gentle hand crafts of the past are important to us, so is the image of a future free of poverty and where reason and science are advanced. That's where Star trek comes in. In this photo, to my left is long time friend Marvin Paxman and behind him, Erika. Marvin and Erika have now taken up cycle touring.

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Fast Forward to 2017, France:

The Ibis had a reasonable breakfast buffet, and we quietly stuffed up on and squirreled away all we could. After coming in yesterday tired and soaked we were now fully recovered and ready to go. And it was going to be easy, sort of. We had booked a place in Strasbourg, an ambitious distance away for us. But the breakfast started at 6, and the whole route would be slightly downhill along a canal, and marked out as Eurovelo 5 (EV5). Right?

Wrong. We started off following our EV5 GPS track, until we reached greenway signs. Then we followed those until a quick check revealed we were off the EV5 track. So we backed out and used GPS to reach the apparent correct way, and the canal. But although the canal was there and the GPS said so get on it, there was only a grass trail. No, no, can't ride that. What is this, the blinkety blink Canal du Midi?

There was nothing for it but to take to the road, which in this case was D45. This would lead to D98, and take us back to the canal at the Plan Incline. Here's the thing about the plan incline - it's an elevator (or escalator) that takes boats up from the lower (Strasbourg) side of the canal to the upper (Sarrebourg) side. The escalator is needed because obviously the land is too steep to be handled by locks. Now that could have told us something. But we really had no choice.

So off we went on D45. It might not be visible on the photo of the map, but D45 eventually switchbacks its way up into the Vosges mountains. Even the hotel we were trying to reach was called Hotel des Vosges. Well we were only in the foothills, but the road still went up up, for 10km before going down for 10 km. We hate that! (We know others don't mind, or even seek out this kind of thing, but not us.)

Our path on the canal as we try to start out

Overview of the canal and path - no way!

We are back riding the dotted line. Yeech.

The down, down ended as expected, back at the canal at the plan incline. Tricia an Ken had come this way in the other direction, and mentioned a route on a decommissioned canal - not a 10 km climb - but at the Sarrebourg end, we didn't find it.

On this map you can see Sarrebourg right in the centre. The canal and cycle path are in blue south of that. Road D45 is marked, south of Niderviller. If you look to the southeast you will see D45 beginning to wind upwards. Fortunately we bailed out onto D98 before totally exhausted. Just east of where D98 is marked is Lutzelbourg.

The plan incline. Boats are lifted from below, on the right, up to -- somewhere.

Back on the canal, it should be easy to get to Strasbourg now.

It was a joy to finally be on the canal that would ease us on down to Strasbourg. The first stop would be Lutzelbourg, where Tricia had identified a bakery that she felt was really good. We found the bakery easily, but sorry to say it did not really have a lot to offer, maybe because of it being Sunday. I felt I needed to get something, after all the buildup, and went for an eclair. The price of 1.60 was maybe in line, though the eclair was unusually small. And I had to tell the lady three times that I wanted the coffee flavour - she seemed to think I would naturally choose chocolate. Tellingly, Tricia's blog said they had looked at the bakery but not actually bought anything. Smart financial managers!

Rather diminutive but good coffee éclair.

Not far beyond Lutzelbourg is Saverne, a much more substantial town. We did not try to go into it, but stuck to the canal. Even so, we could see some interesting looking areas, and on two occasions spied "ants" which is our term for people trailing away from an unseen bakery, carrying their daily baguettes. Even along the canal there were some pleasant clusters of buildings.

From there on in it was standard canal side riding for us, except that there was intermittent rain and often strong cross winds. It was interesting looking at the rain flying dead horizontally at us, sort of.

At one point we encountered a father with a baby in a car seat on his bike, and a youngster pedalling along beside on a 2 wheeler. Dodie pegged the youngster at 3 years old, an amazing age to be 2 wheeling like that. But the kid was out on the canal, seemingly far from anything, in the cross wind, and how about this - going generally faster than us. Dodie attributed this performance to his low centre of gravity!

This little tyke was fast, and had endurance too.

Along the canal, an interesting tree fungus

A canal side building with a fanciful mural. This is just part of it, there was Hansel and Gretl, fairies, and such,

Our first indication that we were reaching Strasbourg was a view of the European Parliament building. The EU elected representatives meet here, though other EU work happens in Brussels and Luxembourg. Not knowing what I was looking at, my first impression was that it was the unfinished "Death Star". But in fact this is the Louise Weiss building, constructed in 1999 at a cost of half a billion euros. For that you would think they could have finished the top floor. (Just kidding.)

The European Parliament. They are still flying the British flag.

EV5 skirts around east of the city, so we abandoned our track and went with signs indicating the way to downtown. Of course the signs dropped, but no matter we spied the cathedral spires. Oops, wrong cathedral, but it happened to be on the right way, and soon we were at the real cathedral. Since the cathedral lay between where we came into the city and the train station, where our hotel is, rain or not, exhausted or not, we left first one and then the other of us outside and went in for a look.

I am about the furthest thing from a Catholic you can find, but I really enjoyed the visit, even the taking of the stock photo of the rose window. The antiquity and hush of these places is intriguing no matter your background, I think.

The area around the cathedral is also fascinating, with so many venerable buildings and cafes standing about. We had been here once before, and then it all seemed much bigger and more complex. But then, it was not October in the rain, and the cafes were in full flower in the street, and crowds were everywhere.

The cathedral square. Note the very old fachwerk building on the corner.

The cathedral. It is of course very tall, but I think shooting upwards makes a lot of distortion.

The rose window. The cathedral was fairly dark and gothic. Even this window is not especially flamboyant.

Near the catherdral a Villeroy and Boch store. Last chance to buy? It was closed!

The GPS now helped us across town toward the train station. We did not actually take a direct route, and found ourselves on the Quai Kleber, which follows a canal to the train station. In this way we ran into the memorial for the grand synagogue that stood on Quai Kleber, and that was destroyed by the Nazis in 1940. The whole story is here. Not only is the Romanesque synagogue now gone, but the actual street is far from the beautiful canal side boulevard pictured in the old photos.

The synagogue, fire bombed. It was soon further demolished and cleared away.

What the street looked like when the synagogue was there.

The synagogue memorial, significantly, is written in French, German, Hebrew, and English.

The train station area, when we got there, was also architecturally interesting. The station, which we have only viewed at a bit of a distance, looks exactly like an inner tube designed by the Michelin man. Maybe its better from closer. In a circle around the inner tube stands many large and old hotels. One of these, the prettiest of the lot by virtue of being pink, is ours.

We chose this hotel for the low price, but it is great. First off, the bikes went into an unused large room on the main floor - maybe it used to be a bar - and with very easy access. Next the antique rickety elevator, and our room with a bath tub! The carpets are frayed, the bathroom faucet sprays in all directions - in short, we love it.

On the elevator we met an interesting man, a visitor from Japan. We noticed him first because he was speaking French, sort of, to the desk clerk. But in the elevator he told us he was in town for a conference. He said it was about "le temps". Back in our room we discussed what he meant - weather, climate, or time - that word in French could support any hypothesis. So when I met him in the elevator again, I got it clarified. He was a professor of psychology, in town with a graduate student to present a paper on the perception of time. Now time, as I know from listening to popular physics programs every bedtime, is the only one of the four obvious dimensions that does not appear to be reversible. People have the impression of an "arrow of time" or "flow of time", always from the present to the future. The professor gave me the essence of his findings in two sentences. Yes, people have this impression. But in countries where writing is left to right, time seems to flow left to right. And in countries where it is the reverse, time seems to people to flow in the other direction. All this, of course, is at odds with physicists like Brian Greene who suggest that all moments of time already exist, just as do all locations in three dimensional space, and they are not flowing anywhere.

Tomorrow there will be breakfast in the old dining room. We are looking forward to it. And we have planned a shorter day, after first checking out the "Petite France" quarter here. Time is certainly flying on this trip, whether or not it is flowing. But no matter what, it will be fun.

The view of the train station from our window.

Today's ride: 85 km (53 miles)
Total: 1,076 km (668 miles)

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