Dwti Draig

This holiday was a little bit different for us to our usual travels, as we had no fixed ideas of where we were going to go, other than our start and end point, and a chunk of time in the middle when we visit the Overland show in the centre of Germany. 

This meant I could spend altogether too long poring over Google maps, saying “what about here?” Luckily I got my way about one place I desperately wanted to visit, as Strasbourg looked to lay in the ideal vicinity to get to where we needed to get to to in Germany.

We opted to stay out of the centre of Strabourg to make driving and parking easier, and to avoid the pesky ULEZ charges. This meant we ended up in a little town called Seltz, which is right on the border of France and Germany in the Alsace region, at the confluence of the Sauer and Rhine rivers. There is even a free cable driven reaction ferry that links Seltz in France with Plittersdorf in Germany; no engine, just the current. It became French in 1680, but is still very Germanic. 

We chose Seltz because it has commuter trains to Strasbourg, 50 minutes away. We woke early to walk the 1.5 miles to the train station, through deserted streets. We had decided to buy our tickets at the station, but there was nowhere to buy them, and we couldn’t make sense of the ticket machine. We tried buying them on a website, but the payment page kept crashing. We took a screenshot of that as proof and happily got on the train, assuming we could buy the tickets on there. Oh no; big mistake. Using Google Translate and trying our best to convince a pretty female French conductor that it REALLy wasn’t our fault, we got fined 50E for boarding the train without a ticket. The journey would have cost us 23E. In fairness to the conductor she should have charged us 50E each, but she let us get away with just one fine. Phew. 

We were soon in Strasbourg and left the pretty sketchy area around the train station as quickly as we could to visit the old town.

After about a 10 minute walk the Cathedral of Our Lady (Notre Dame) appeared like a behemoth, soaring between the buildings like a giant Gothic beast. It’s massive; its spire stands at 142 metres high. It’s set in the heart of the UNESCO listed Grand Ile, and is just superb. We joined the quickly moving line to enter, and stook, flabbergasted in awe at the huge interior, and its stained glass windows, especially the Rose window. 

It was time for a distinctly non Gothic coffee after the visit, and we found an independent coffee shop and sat down to watch the tour groups go by, and several armed military patrols. We then stopped in a bakery for a quick little snack snack and sat in a quiet square to nosh, before going on to the place I had longed to see the most. 

Petite France is just so picturesque and enchanting my photos just don’t do them justice, and trust me, I took many many photos trying to capture the essence of this special place. It was once the home of millers,  tanners and fishermen, but is now an UNESCO World Heritage Site of cobbled lanes, half timbered houses and canals. It is famous for its Ponts Couverts, or covered bridges, which were originally built in the 13th century. These bridges, supported by stone towers once formed part of the city’s medieval ramparts, and, together with the Vauban Dam helped control access to the city and its canals. The dam wasn’t just a dam, it was a floodable defence system. In times of attack it could raise the water level and flood the southern approaches to the city, turning the surrounding land into an impassable swamp to protect against invaders. The locks and sluices are still in use today, and it was fun to watch the pleasure boat tours use them. It is obligatory to wave to all the people on the boats, as they pass by you, and they clearly understand the assignment and wave like idiots back!

After a little 5 mile stroll, it was time for lunch. Lyn found a tiny little sausage shop that he HAD to go into, and then we had a well deserved drink in a gorgeous beer garden we found hidden away, before we got the train back.

Luckily we had bought tickets for this journey…. No way were we going to pay a fine again! Unfortunately the train was like

an absolute furnace, and we both sat there for 50 minutes dripping like we were being cooked in a Hades barbecue. We were glad to get out when we reached Seltz, but then we had to trudge the 1.5 miles back to our hot truck. A well deserved cold shower was bliss after a hot, sticky 8 miler day, but I’m so glad we finally got to see beautiful Strasbourg.