Alsace France / Germany area

The area south of Luxembourg along the Rhine river right now makes up the French departments of Moselle and Alsace and the southern part of Germany's state of Baden-Wurttemberg including the Black Forest. The French side has been German as recently as WWI but it's now thoroughly French in food, fashion, and fact now.

We spent a week in this area moving back and forth between countries. The language changes at both the northern border and at the Rhine as does the food, opening times of stores, customs, tour busses, and even tourists. Very few French in the Black Forest and very few Germans in Strasbourg. Ethnically they are very different also. The French side has a wide range of backgrounds, Indian, Arab, African, Chinese, while the German side is really much more mono-cultural.

Saarbrucken, Germany is a bustling modern town with a wealth of buildings designed by Fredrich Stengel in the 1700s. The trademark look includes slightly arched windows and black roofs with dormers. Many of them have been transformed recently for this century's use such as the Schloss, below, which is now an office building with a glass structure inserted in the middle enclosing two really nice spiral staircases.

The Ludwigskirche is a Georgian building looking more like a library. A Dutch-style windmill in the middle of town has had a clock hung off the brake rope. The Catholic church of St. Johann looks for all the world like Independence Hall in Philadelphia done in multi-hued sandstone. Darn, no pictures. Sorry.

We stopped at a couple of installations along the Maginot Line. Before WWII the French thought a line of fortifications would keep the Germans from attacking them again. Between 1931 and 1936 they built 108 underground artillery fortresses along the German and Italian borders (with a few across from Belgium and Switzerland). Worked like a champ. The Italians never invaded and the Germans never crossed the Maginot Line - they came through Belgium instead. "The futility of fixed fortifications".

We didn't know some 10 of these forts actually saw action. After the Germans were in France they did mount some attacks which all failed. Fort Schoenenbourg, which we visited, was dive bombed and bombarded by 420mm shells for 3 weeks. One of the forward batteries dropped 5 inches in the ground due to the vibration but it never lost the use of any of its guns and only sustained one casualty when a barrel exploded in a gun turret.

The crew were still fighting until July 30, 1940 - 5 days after Paris was taken and France capitulated. They only surrendered after orders came down from the High Command and all 620 men were taken prisoners of war.

The underground portion of Shoenenbourg has been painstakingly restored for visitors. After 40 years of rot this seems to be an heroic effort. The air supply and electrical system, of course, works well and they've even restored the diesel engines which only run occasionally. All the new wiring is convincingly old looking - you really have to study the place to see where modern techniques are used. The most jarring aspect is the cleanliness but it probably was that way in the 1930s.

Inside there is about 3 miles of tunnels.
You walk 90ft down (135 steps) to reach this point.
Most of the tunnels have narrow-gauge tracks and 600v catenary.

The area near the entrance (farthest from Germany) contains
barracks, kitchen, maintenance, power, air handling, infirmary, etc.
Enlisted men slept 12-across and 3 deep.

The air intake goes (or did go) through a bank of filters designed to trap poison gas.
These have charcoal and paper filters. One is cutaway to show the detail.

From this back area you have to walk over a mile through the single tunnel to reach the forward areas - command, fire control, and the batteries themselves.

Observation desks. From here, instructions from spotters on the surface were
transformed into azimuth and elevation for individual guns.
Photographs taken from the spotters' locations and maps
line the opposite wall to determine distances.

Ammo racks for the 74mm shells. These were carried in on the trains, taken down elevators to the main tunnel, transported to the front area, stored in a maze of bunkers, hoisted some 100ft up to the turrets on elevators, and maneuvered there from an overhead monorail.

This is the mechanism used to raise a turret. In the front area, they have restored just one of 6 turrets and supporting areas has been restored.

There was a 7th planned but never implemented because of cost overruns.

This station holds the alignment officer to the right. The gunner is up the ladder.
They could maintain a firing rate of 1 shell per minute.
During the battle 16,000 shells were fired.

We actually visited the Simserhof fort first. A mistake. It's very similar but the presentation consists of a 20 minute movie and a ride in a very nice electric robot cart through the magazines of the fort while an A/V screen shows you what it looked like. After that, we needed to see a real fort the next day to feel we had experienced the real thing.

On a canal near Saverne, France, there's an incline lift. Sort of like a very tall slanted lock. Cool thing. It was drizzling like mad when we got there but we still stood in the rain long enough to see it raise a boat to the top. You'll need to peer closely at the pictures we took through the trees.

From the catchment basin at the bottom, 2 good sized boats enter a concrete box filled with water. Then, as two big counterweights ride down on rails, the box raises to the upper level of the canal where the doors open and the boats go on their way. Fascinating but we couldn't get close. But we did get wet.

Strasbourg is a pretty good town. Did laundry, had some good breakfasts, walked around the "Petite France" section full of half-timbered houses where there was once a VD colony after a war with Italy - at least that's their story.

As the L'ill enters the city, they built a defensive fortress right across the river.
Sure ruins the barge traffic but must have worked.
Tourists can go through the fort, which is used to store old statues and new pigeons.
They can also stroll across the top, where you can see the 4 arms of the river (below).

Took a day to wander at least the north half of the Black Forest. It's very hilly terrain, much like the Smoky Mountains in Virginia.

There's a real Mummelsee - a 50 acre lake complete with paddleboats.
They claim this is where the legend of the Rhine Maidens was born.

We also saw a sign directing us to a wasserfall (waterfall). Took the road.
Found a gasthaus in the woods and a wasserfall a half kilometer downstream.
Good beer.

We also went to Baden-Baden. Expected another tourist town but found, instead, a typical German city and typical European streets. Six blocks from downtown, trying to get back through pedestrian zones and one-way streets, we followed a sign "Centrum" and went through two tunnels (more than a kilometer long each) before we ended up right back where we started.

Across the Rhine from the Black Forest there are forests and hills just as large on the French side. We drove these hills many times going back and forth to the European Patchwork Expo located almost right in the middle.

In these hills we ran across a huge French WWI cemetery and, just down the road, a memorial dedicated to one WWI battle. Le Linge, near Colmar, France, was part of Germany before WWI and they built an extensive set of trenches on the very top of a hill. We folks 90 years later hear about trench warfare and how "over the top" meant sure death charging a machine gun. What a waste.

Le Linge is about a half mile across and a half mile deep. Normally 400 German troops occupied the fort but when fighting broke out in the area over 2000 manned it at any one time.

From August 1914 until October 1915 French troops tried to take this fort and in fact did overrun about half of it in the spring of 1915 but were repulsed the next month. Consider 14 months of fighting for a quarter square mile of land. Over 9,000 men died on each side. This particular battle ended when the French withdrew, finally realizing it just wasn't worth it. The Germans never advanced to follow them, the whole conflict at this point just faded away.

We walked the entire German part of the fortification (to the right of the line of xxxxs below). The stone trenchworks are still astoundingly intact, including many of the metal pieces and barbed wire. There has been no desecration, no trash, not even cigarette butts, no graffiti. It's a very quiet place. Grass is let grow wild and trees have re-emerged. The entire place was dirt and rock during the war of course.

At places, the German and French trenches were just 20 feet away from each other. Today the French side is just depressions in the ground because the reinforcing was done in wood. The following pictures are all of the German side.

Where bodies have been found crosses have been erected with what identification where possible. Most are French soldiers, just a couple of German. We think these must be where bodies have surfaced as the crosses include the date found - right up to 2000.

So what was the importance of Le Linges? What was the importance of the entire war? The map below covers a width of about 40 miles total. The top is south of Strasbourg, the orange tag at the bottom is Mulhouse - about 40 miles.

Of course there was more fighting in Belgium, in Northern France, and in many other places around Europe - they call it a World War. But in this area, as everywhere, the result of the millions of lives lost in WWI was absolutely minimal in the course of history. What a waste.

Oh, the entire Alsace region west of the Rhine ended up back with France in treaties in 1918 and later.

One of the centers of cloth-making back in the 1700s was Mulhouse, France (or maybe Germany then, we're not sure). Anyway, they claim to have created the process of printing on cloth and the various companies in town created a collection of samples of all their prints in one place. This collection is now part of the Musee de l'Impression sur Etoffes in Mulhouse and contains 6 million samples. Have camera will travel.

Don't panic though, the collection isn't on view for visitors without credentials. A small sample, at right, was all there was to see. Still, there was some interesting equipment to photograph.

Engraving stand for brass printing drums.

Rolls used in machines like those above.

A special exhibit in conjunction with the European Patchwork Expo displayed about 20 locally made quilts. No explanations and not prize-winners.

A very different pattern that Terry is not familiar with.
You need to stand back to see it clearly.
She calls it "Clothesline". Looks like a good way to use scraps.

Here's the internet access point where Bob posted the France update to this web site. This is typical of the type - found near train stations. This one is Indian-run but many are Pakistani or maybe Jordanian. They have a couple of phone booths where you can call anywhere in Asia cheaply for cash and a couple of internet terminals available for a couple of euros per hour. If the operator is savvy, you can plug in your laptop to a LAN cable he or you will detach from one of the other terminals. We've seen, and used, very similar shops from Barcelona to Budapest to Berlin.

At 17,000km we finally had to add a liter of oil to the engine of our Renault. It's run fine the whole time but a couple of very minor rattles have cropped up.

Hey! To heck with the price of gas. Look at the price of motor oil in Europe. Gack. 8.49€ for the cheap stuff. That's almost $10 per quart.

The publicity recently about Europe sending the US gasoline drove up the prices here temporarily. The highest we paid for diesel fuel was 1.21€/liter but the last fill-up was at 1.03€. It's averaged probably 1.06€.

Oh, we found out why so many Trabants are still running around East Germany. They were such cheap POSs you'd think they'd have rotted into the ground by now. But the body was made in a type of fiberglass where a layer of cotton is sandwiched between two layers of plastic. (600cc, 2cyl, 26hp).

We got to thinking about why we're doing this web site (besides Bob's obsessive need to keep busy). A lot is to share our experiences with our friends. That may really be in part just showing off.

The other day, we discussed the need to have some Top 10 lists as we leave the continent. Favorite museum, hotel, food, bar, beer, annoyance, etc. Terry remembered a restaurant in a small town where there was a parade. Good food. Only two things on the menu. But we couldn't remember exactly what we ate. Or the name of the city (it was Neckarsulm). This web site will serve as an index to our memories in our old age.

So far, Bob's taken over 8,000 pictures. We'll have you all over for a slide show next year.

Saarbruken, Germany - Stiefel Brau. Opened in 1990, it's very similar to American brewpubs. Located in part of a 300 year old brewery plant in the center of Saarbruken just off a pedestrian restaurant section. It's owned by the Bruch brewery.

All-modern brick and stone interior with 10-liter coppers in the less-formal side of the restaurant facing the open kitchen and near the doors to the backyard court used on warm days.

Hotel Restaurant Mon Village - Offemont, France. Just what the name says, a 2-star guest house with a spacious restaurant and a brewery behind the bar. All in very plain but well-kept and clean 60s decoration with lots of breweriana. Signs on the wall, umbrellas, bottles, kegs, etc.

It's obviously the town hangout for this small village. Rock-Ola jukebox, foosball, pinballs, and a band set up in the corner ready to go.

What a great booth. A tap and drain right in the middle.
All it needs is a meter so your group can buy beer by the gallon.

The Haute Rhine region of the southern Alsace is wine country. In places you see nothing but miles and miles of grape fields. And where there is stuff to ferment there's stuff to distill. This fuels an active subindustry of Eaux De Vie. There are dozens of small distillers who macerate fruit into grape-based vodka. Each of these has a sales room but one in Lapoutroie has found a way to garner free advertising by adding a small museum of old distilling equipment, bottles, advertising, etc. At least this is one museum with a gift shop selling more than books, toys, and posters.