(Sunday, Sept. 20) Once back on the open road, we were making good time towards the Rhine, but clouds were forming off to the west and we could tell that the sun would be setting behind those nimbo-cumuli towers either just before or just after we reached Ribeauville.
Espaliered apple trees and grape vines covered much of the hillsides leading down to the highway above the Bodensee and exception for resort development nearer the lake this area seems to have remained quite rural. A little over two hours after leaving Lindau we came down off the rolling farmland and descended on a steep, winding road into a canyon whose sides appeared to be made of black shale type rock. Around 5:30 pm we stopped in Freiburg on the German side of the Rhine to fill up the BMW with gas (and empty our pockets of Euros).
We figured we had about an hour to go until reaching Ribeauville and that would have been the case, but the Beemer seemed to have cast a spell over Miss Moneypenny so she would not let enter France. While it looked like a straight shot from Freiburg to Colmar on the west side of the Rhine, Miss Moneypenny sent us onto the A5 Autobahn north toward Stuttgart. After roaring along at 130-140 KPH for a few miles, we decided to get off the Autobahn and consult our Michelin maps. We concluded that we now needed to head south towards Switzerland, go past Freiburg, then get off the Autobahn and go northwest on secondary roads to reach the Rhine. We called the hotel in Ribeauville, were told it should take us another hour to get them, and set off once again.
We hit a big traffic backup near the river and Cindy rightly guessed it was because bridge repairs were being done and there was only one lane open across the bridge. We only got a brief look at the river as we crossed it as fast as we could, then turned north towards Colmar once we were in France.
Ribeauville is a small, and quite old town, with narrow streets snaking their way up the side of the mountains. We had neither a map of the town nor specific directions to the hotel, but Miss Moneypenny led us right to the door of the hotel. After dumping our bags in the lobby and parking the car, Marie-Madeline (one of two sisters who run the hotel) showed us to our room and made a dinner reservation for us.
Around 8:30 we walked a little over five minutes to the Hotel and Restaurant Au Cheval Blanc near the top of the Grand Rue, the main street the runs from the bottom to the top of the town. The only other diners were a young French couple in their twenties, a lone Japanese tourist, and a thirty-something husband and wife and their two young kids. Because France and Germany have traded “ownership” of this area, many towns have Germany names, and the cuisine has French and German influences. So our Coq au Vin dinner was made not with a red wine from Burgundy, but an Alsatian Riesling, and the side dish was not potatoes, but Spaetzle.
It was a quiet evening out, even though the little toddler at the table next to us kept running gleefully back and forth between her parents and the toy box the restaurant maintains at the rear of the dining room, carting back various treasures to show off.
We were happy to see this day come to a close and went to bed looking forwarded to a day without driving on Monday.
