Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Alsace & Lorraine: OBERNAI

View from our apartment in Obernai. The potted tree is the corner of the central plaza.

June 19: A new day! We both agreed that stopping in Titisee was a good idea. We awoke refreshed and were refueled by a lovely German breakfast of cold cuts, cheese, rolls, jams, juice and coffee at our gasthaus. None of the people at the gasthaus spoke English, but we communicated. After our fresh start, we drove to Obernai without any problems, but it still took about three more hours! Google forsook us! We only stopped once this morning--at a drugstore located in a cornfield in Germany near the border with France. I don't think we could have mentally or physically driven these three hours last night without getting hopelessly lost again.

One of my big mistakes was not to bring our GPS. Richard wanted to bring our Garmin, but to do so, we had to download European maps to our device. I had already bought some Michelin and Marco Polo maps, and didn't want to spend $100 on Garmin European maps. I didn't think it would be necessary--I was wrong, so wrong. What we didn't realize, and didn't remember from driving around Europe 30 years ago, was that navigation can be challenging. You can't just get on the A9 and go to Munich because the road signs aren't necessarily labeled as A9, You navigate by city names, not road names, so while going 120 km., all of a sudden, you must chose between going to Stuttgart or Tubingen. Those cities might be 100 km from your current location, so you must quickly find them on the map and chose the city that is in the direction of Munich. Sometimes you follow a sign to a town in the correct direction, but you find yourself on a slow road. You are on a road to Munich, but not the autoroute. Then there are the traffic circles. They are everywhere in the countryside of Germany and France. Instead of intersections with traffic lights, there are big traffic circles with three or four spokes leading in different directions. Occasionally, the signs are askew, and you are confused about where they are pointing. We got to be pretty good with the traffic circles, and if we weren't sure where to get off, we just circled around again. It's actually a good system--you keep moving. Traffic circles also eliminate traffic lights.

We were both taken with the beauty of the countryside. Europeans are smart. They clump their development into cities, towns or villages with vast green spaces of forests, fields and farms in between. We have seen no sprawl. The entire country (and we've seen a lot) is manicured and mowed. Even the forests are gorgeous. Perfection!

Our apartment building

The courtyard of our building

Obernai is a beautiful town, albeit crowded with tourists, and we love our apartment! Veronique accomodated our screwed-up arrival time and welcomed us. We are staying in a modern efficiency in a very old house (hundreds of years old) in the heart of the town. There is literally no better location--we are steps from the central plaza and across from a boulangerie (how convenient). We have a small red Ikea kitchen, a nice bathroom with large shower, a table for eating and writing, a wardrobe, TV and king bed. I love the stone wall. Perfection!

We enjoyed a decadent Alsatian lunch at Les Petites Casseroles. Richard had a traditional Alsatian dish called baeckeoffe. On Mondays, laundry day, women traditionally took a casserole dish filled with potatoes, onions, vegetables and several types of meat, doused with white wine to the town baker to cook in his oven. Baeckeoffe literally means "baker's oven." I had a delicious dish of potatoes cooked in a cream and wine sauce with munster cheese and some sort of crispy smoked pork. It was decadently delicious.