Day 77: Strasbourg to Seltz

May 5, 2025

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For leaving Strasbourg we wove through about 7 km of those 5 story tall, probably early 20th century apartment buildings. They aren't unattractive, but tourists would not book in just to see them.

As we made our way through the apartment areas, the number of bikes tied up at the intersections was noteworthy. The funny part was that many of these were derelict, while others were ok, and others again were costly ebikes. After a while this made my brain tired, because it was scanning the heaps of bikes and assessing how easily I could repair, or not, each one. It also occurred to me that the derelict bikes made good cover for the good bikes. Any thieves would have to do like me, and sort out what was worthwhile and what was junk.

For about 4 km beyond the apartment buildings, we continued to work our way though suburbs. The house here were solid, but plain.

Finally we hit a forest reserve, and this marked our exit from the orbit of Strasbourg. 10 km or so is normal for getting out of a city, and at least Strasbourg did not include any car dealerships or hair dressers in the gauntlet.

As the sign shows, we are now on EV 15, the Rhine Route! The route runs on both the French and the German sides. Here on the French side, trailside panels show a string of interesting sounding villages as we go north.

We noticed some of these bunkers, sad reminders of WWII.

More than once we spotted nesting swans.

Despite the tourist material, we found cycling on this side of the Rhine today to be rather tiresome. The provision for bicycles was spotty - sometimes with dedicated off road paths, sometimes with designated shoulders on the road, sometimes riding the sidewalks, and sometimes riding the shoulderless white line.

Beside this shoulder we could at least look at hops, just starting to climb its supports.

Near Offendorf there was a distraction in the form of a half fossilized hunk of oak that had been pulled from a quarry. The age of the tree at time of death was figured at 200 years, and that death happened 2000 years ago!

Here we are at Herrlisheim, working through suburban style housing.

The houses are ok, but again, not tourist attractions.

This duck seemed extra speckly, but Merlin says "just" a Mallard.

The day had started at 10 degrees, with a chilling headwind. Although the temperature did rise a bit, or even a lot later on, Dodie especially was becoming increasingly cold. She had seen an ad for the Tiger restaurant in Dalhunden, and this began to play on her mind. A restaurant like that would mean a hot meal, and a hot meal means warmth!

We tracked down the Tiger when we reached Dalhunden, and sure enough it was closed. What else would you expect at noon on a Monday?

But Dalhunden had another restaurant up its sleeve - the Star.

The Star also looked closed, but when I pulled on the door I was greeted by a scene from a Peter Mayle book. That is, people were sitting and eating the "plat du jour". Unlike the restaurants in the tourist locations, where visitors are seated outside usually in large numbers, and are eating the 18-28 euro selections, here we had just local people, and the "plat du jour" was €9.90, unless you included the excellent salad bar, bringing you to €12.40.

The special was boeuf bourguignonne with pureed carrot and potato. Spying something different on another table, I was able to get turkey in mushroom sauce, with fries. These look pretty plain in the photo, without being arranged with the salad bar stuff, but we gobbled up the salad bar well before thinking about photos!

As Dodie had hoped, these hot choices really hit the spot, and Dodie was revived enough to field some extensive UQs from the proprietor lady.

Across the street from the restaurant was city hall, an attractive building that amplified our already hot stew driven positive assessment of this town,

This Black Redstart landed right by me as we were stopped for a moment, and I was able to pull out the little camera for this candid shot!

We also noticed these unique tall, red clovers. We only see them in Europe, but have read that they have started to be planted in North America. They are "Trifolium incarnatum, known as crimson clover or Italian clover, is a species of herbaceous flowering plant in the family Fabaceae, native to most of Europe."

Although we have been paralleling the Rhine all day, only at the end did we reach a spot where we could see it. So now we proudly declare "The Grampies have reached the Rhine (again)!"

Our hotel in Seitz, the Hotel des Bois, had sent us some cryptic instructions about codes to punch to get into the building. The cryptic bit was that there was apparently a "starter code" of some dozen numbers and symbols (depending how you count blanks and such in their message) and then there was a "comfort code" of about 8 characters, that we guess would work once their system had seen you master the dozen characters.

When we got to the door we were confronted by the gizmo shown below. It was completely dark and mute, and I spent some time pushing first that loudspeaker looking area, and ultimately pushing everything in sight. No response. Dodie had the idea of pushing the numbers we had been given, whether there was feedback or not. She did that, but there was no response from the door. So we phoned the number for the hotel, and got a recording. Now we had nightmares of phoning Booking.com and having them do their usual nothing. And on the outskirts of this little town, there really was nothing else.

We were pondering all this, when suddenly a lady came to the door! Your stupid "ipad" does nothing! were our first words to her. "No, no it's fine" was her reply. "Yeah, show me", said I. The lady took my notes on which I had transcribed the codes from the messages we had received, and she tapped them on the dead, mute keyboard. I noted that the "+ v" I had faithfully transcribed actually meant "and hit the check mark to confirm". But anyway, the lady completed her typing, and then yanked hard on the mute door, which opened. "See!" she crowed. Needless to say we were not impressed.

Later, the lady gave us the key to the distant bike garage. After a while she followed us out there, finding that we were turning the key this way and that and the garage door handle this way and that, without too much success. I am sure in her mind we were real idiots. To find out what was in my mind, look for the one star rating on Booking, tomorrow.

That rating could have run as high as three stars, because in truth the room is ok. But they followed up the front door and the bike garage door with nonsense about the wifi key. In German, French, and English they identically said for wifi to "enter your last name" (Where??) and then to use "hoteldesbois" (be careful to use all lowercase, they said) as the "code". Of course, this is all drivel, but I did find a network named "Hoteldesbois". When this failed to give a URL, I went down to find the lady, who was nowhere to be seen. So I phoned, and this time someone picked up. But they said the wifi was broken and not to worry, it would be fixed tomorrow!

Tomorrow we will be in Germany. Presumably things work in Germany!

Today's ride: 60 km (37 miles)
Total: 2,579 km (1,602 miles)

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