Our ride to the Alsace allowed us the time to talk about our experiences in Brussels. Our overwhelming thought was, “What a dour bunch of people!” We are very accustom to entering shops or restaurants in France and Spain and Italy, greeting everyone in the building. In Brussels, we did that and we were received with glum silence, perhaps because we were speaking French and they were more Flemish, or perhaps, they just don’t really care. Meagan had told us that there is a concerted effort on the part of the Flemish to regain their majority and language in Belgium. Brussels, as a HQ for the EU, will always be a bilingual capital, but the rest of the country seems to want to be Flemish. We were told that the schools in the north of Belgium no longer teach French. Seems a shame but there you have it.
Our route took us past lots of World War I monuments, battlefields, and fortifications, which I found fascinating. There was a lot of wide open spaces filled with farms and animals, all of which looked immaculate. The closer we came to Strasbourg, the worst the weather became and soon we were smack in the middle of a downpour which lasted for almost forty minutes. It was so heavy that there were times when the windshield wipers could not keep up with the rain and passing trucks, became quite the adventure. After breaking free of the squall, we were very close to our hotel and things began to look very familiar. Half timbered houses, stamp sized villages, tall spires from churches perched high on the top of the hills that lead up to the Vosges Mountains, reassured us that we had made the right decision to spend the night in Alsace.
Our hotel was in a very small village with one of everything, pharmacy, news store, bakery, butcher shop and small grocery store. The hotel served as a the cafe for the village and was a lovely place build in the style of the Alsace with lots of wood, balconies flowing with flowers, and half timbered to fit with the surrounding homes. After a warm greeting at reception, we were giving our key to the room with a voucher for two glasses of Cremant, the local sparkling wine similar to Champagne. Our room was comfortable, if rather small, but for one night it was perfect, made even more enjoyable went we saw the bottle of Cremant accompanied by a hand written note from the manger. We had intended to take a nice walk before dinner but the rain had caught up with us again and we opted to sit in the bar and drink our glasses of Cremant.
Dinner was fabulous, the food, the service, the table settings, everything was just the way it should be and made us feel like perhaps you can go home again. There is a local Alsace wine called Edelzwicker which we had not had for a very long time and is usually serve in ceramic jugs of various sizes and sure enough they had it available and certainly affordable. Cindy had some of the best seared duck liver she ever had and the portion was enormous, followed by a lovely creative salad. I had a pumpkin soup, which was served in a heated bowl and served from a silver soup tureen, which was left on the table for seconds, followed by seared duck breast with roasted root vegetable. We shared a dessert of Black Forest Cake, which Cindy declared spectacular. The cherries were dark, tart and juicy, which was a great foil to all of the bittersweet chocolate shaving that topped and surrounded the cream and cake. Quetsch eau de vie is a local specialty that is served ice cold after a rich meal. It is made from a fruit like a purple plum and is crystal clear and Cindy loved it, as I did my Armagnac and with smile on our faces, we waltzed up to our room.
The next morning was very cold, wet and windy, which limited us to a much shorter walk than we had hoped for but had the advantage of getting us on the road to Italy that much sooner. We entered Switzerland, which of course is not part of the EU, after a fifteen minute ride and got in line for an immigration/customs check, which is when we remembered that we had packed our passports in the luggage in the back of the car. Cindy displayed an amazing agility as she twisted and turned to get to my suitcase and passport. After all of that work, we were simply waved through and entered the river city of Basel. Once out of the city Switzerland looks just like all the travel posters, chalets, neat farms, tall mountains capped in white and I swear I could smell chocolate. We stopped for gas so that I had plenty to get though tunnels and passes, and we had a chance to use our German as we inquired how to pay and where were the toilets. It seems that now in order to use a toilet at a gas station, you must insert a euro, take a receipt and use the facility. The receipt allows you to get a euro discount on something from the shop, all very time consuming and rather silly. I doubt that they get a ‘bad element’ on autoroutes, but perhaps it provides more employment since there were at least two people at each station helping folks understand the process.
In all of our planning for this trip, the words January, Switzerland, snow never appeared in the same sentence and therefore we were really surprised when we hit tons of snow at the higher elevations. Traffic was down to one lane, following two snow plows up the hill toward the Gotthard Tunnel, a ten and a half mile respite from blowing snow and slippery roads. I had hoped that at the end of the tunnel it would be sunny and clear but that was not to be. While the snow was not as heavy, it was still coming down and the road was slippery, but we were now heading downhill and with every five miles, the conditions got better and better until we were finally out of all the weather and we could see a bit of sunshine and we knew we were closing in on Italy.
Sure enough, Italy greeted us with brilliant sunshine and we were soon ensconced in our corner suite at the Metropole Suisse, right on the edge of Lake Como. The views were jaw dropping and we had a 180 degree view of the lake, hills and homes and city that make the Como area so famous and decided that the trip was well worth the hassle.
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