Strasbourg presents the standard travel challenges

We have arrived in Strasbourg and look!!! we are with our travel buddies, Kris and Jim!

We travel well together because we have a lot of the same interests. Here, for example, is our joint happiness at finding a free bathroom with toilet paper and functional toilets:

And here I am – sent into a bakery to purchase a delicate French pastry snack called the Kougelhof – making the executive decision to purchase the extra large entire Bundt cake version to surprise Ron and Jim, who share a common appreciation for baked goods.

Strasbourg is fabulous! It’s a mix of German and French architecture because the city has changed hands so many times. It was a French city after 1681. In 1871 it became a German city and stayed German until 1918, after World War I. It’s a lovely city for wandering but stressful if you’re trying to navigate by GPS. It sits in some kind of GPS dead zone and so following our phones is not working out. The 1 kilometer – 12 minute – walk from the train station to the hotel took Ron and I at least 40 minutes. The GPS walked us in circles for awhile and then we stood, staring at our phones for a few minutes, until a nice French citizen couldn’t take it anymore and came up to figure out where we wanted to go and how he could get us there. (Note: as I stood there, working on my phone, Ron decided to pitch in and do his own research and promptly located a similarly-named hotel in Tokyo and tried to see if, maybe, it might be easier to GPS ourselves there, even though it’s a few kilometers further).

Here are a couple of pics from our first day touring:

Above is the main square, called the Place Kleber. I liked the architectural variations there. Above you see buildings from the Middle Ages, but if you turn around (below) and look the other way, you see a 1970s office building and a white cement apartment tower from the 1950s. Apparently, the cement tower is called the wart:

Here’s Ron pondering the cathedral, Gothic-style, which opened in 1439. It took over 300 years to build, with initial construction started in 1015:

I borrowed the picture below to try to give you a better view:

I’m crazy for the stained glass in the cathedrals, of course, and always on the lookout for the rose windows. Rose windows are generally a riot of rich red and blue in the cathedrals – massive circles of stained glass. In Strasbourg, the rose window is instead green and yellow dominant – first one I’ve ever seen – and apparently showcases the corn and produce farming riches of this area. (Pic not mine)

That’s it for now. We’ve barely had time to get started but Ron’s already two purchases in. He bought an entire novel we don’t have any room for and then, when Kris and I wandered off for 20 minutes, Ron picked up this 35 Euro Le Coq Sportif baseball cap in the very fancy Galeries Lafeyette. It’s worth the purchase price to hear Ron mispronounce the brand name each time!

Tomorrow we’ve chucked all the original plans and we’re heading out 50km into the countryside to check out a little village and a museum. Kris and Jim – as ever – have indefensibly complete and total faith in my planning skills and Ron doesn’t care what we do, as long as he can strut around France in his new cap. I’m just hopeful that my GPS works. Our destination – the Alsace Moselle Memorial Museum has promised me – on its very own website – that the museum is a “short” 10 minute walk from the Schirmeck train station. Other travel websites indicate that it’s a 20 minute walk up a country road. Travel math question: if the 12 minute walk from the Strasbourg train station took us 40 minutes, how long will it take us to get to the museum tomorrow?