🇫🇷 Rosheim, Obernai & Ribeauvillé

 

Day Five

We woke to a cold and overcast day. Our warm 8 degrees Spring sunshine had disappeared. Coated up we want to see as many village towns as we could on our last day in the Alsace region. Each of these unforgettable towns have similar pastel coloured timber chocolate box houses but there is always a stand out quality that makes you remember each village individually.

Here are the hidden gems that we found in the following towns:

Rosheim

A small town village with high festive spirit. The streets of Rosheim were decorated with timber bunnies in preparation for Easter. Wells, shop fronts and town were also decorated with chickens, flowers and eggs.

The stand out for this town was its 3 town arch ways which contain the Main Street and its interesting statues.

The 21 faces on the church columns were also impressive.

 

Obernai

Obernai has a beautiful old town. The old town is filled with wooden houses painted in pastel colours. We found a great gluten free bakery and they made delicious gluten free chocolate cookies and almond milk coffee. As the temperature began to once again plummet we need energy to warm our bodies.

But the special hero of this town was the vintage style carousel. I have a soft spot for these vintage fun fair merry – go- rounds. This one was spectacular as it was themed to the region of Alsace with storks and swans and old town emblems. The timing was perfect to see this at the end of our Alsace trip as we could recognise almost every image from our trip, like a three dimensional picture album of our time here.

The church here was also very impressive.

 

 

Ribeauvillé

Ribeauvillé is a very cute wine town. The streets in the old town are filled with cute little shops designed for tourists. From the cobbled main village street your eyes are take by the sight of a striking hilltop castle. We would have loved to have climbed to the top of the castle but it just started to snow. We drove back to our apartment with snow flakes falling amongst the whirling wind gusts.

 

 

The Beast from the East returns….

Day 6

Our worst nightmare hit! It snowed all night. Our car the next morning was buried in at least 15 cm of pure fresh white snow. All the cars in the car parked looked now like puffed up marshmallows on wheels!

The town of Colmar looked magical as if it was covered in a thick dusting of icing sugar.

We had to use a shower cleaner and the dust pan to dig, scrape, push, bang and flick the snow from every panel and crevice of our brand new car (we should call the car Ice,Ice,Baby now!). We had a 3 hour drive to Bingen in Germany. After our fingers turned a red-purple, felt like pins and needles and were ready to snap off, we were ready for our journeys drive on snow roads.

Our drive was interesting as lots of drivers only cleaned their wind screens before driving and not the rest of the car which meant it was a constant unexpected snow fight on the roads as roof snow blew off their moving car splat straight into our windscreen.

The drive was like watching a David Attenborough documentary which was exciting for me as I was not driving. My favourite memory was when I saw two big hares out on a snowy field both standing high on their hind legs having a full on boxing match. Paws swinging at each other, bounding on the stop with their long ears flinging around with every punch. Wow!! I shouted with excitement and I think Rob nearly drove off the road. Oops!!! The field hares were probably fighting as they couldn’t find the hole to their burrows as the snow had covered them and they were blaming each other.