We left Dannemarie on Monday and descended 23 locks to Mulhouse right on the Swiss border and formerly a Swiss town. All along the canal there is a sealed towpath that the Euro-Velo route follows. This is a bike route from Budapest to Nantes on the English Channel. It is very popular with cyclists and a whole tourist trade in itself.
Mulhouse appears to have been heavily destroyed in wars and there is not much of a character to it. But it was the end of the Canal du Rhone au Rhin and next day it was the Rhine that we entered and immediately accelerated away to 19km/h. Unfortunately after a couple of hours the engine started spluttering and needed coaxing for several minutes to keep it running before it roared back into life. The Rhine is not a good place to have a dead engine! (We changed fuel filters in the next few days and it appears it was an air lock in one of them causing the problem as we once had before in East Germany.)
Late Afternoon we turned off the Rhine into a small side canal that leads to the capital city of Alsace – Colmar. Alsace has mainly been German over the centuries and it shows. The house are Germanic with lots of steep roofed half timbered houses. The most common spoken language is German and the food certainly owes a lot to its German roots. Colmar is probably the largest and most medieval city we have seen in France (at least with half timbered houses). It is very pretty and has many canals and streams flowing through it.
We wandered around getting lost in the maze of streets before stumbling across some landmark which we could re-located ourselves. In the process we came across a lovely restaurant called JY’s in the Petite Venise (Small Venice) area of town. It was a Michelin one star restaurant but the pricing seemed quite affordable and so we gave it a shot.
Well presented food but a bit lacking in flavour was the verdict. But it was a nice lunch and prepared us for the next day and further cruising on the Rhine. We hurtled down the river once more all the way to Strasbourg where we turned off on to the Canal Marne au Rhin. We didn’t stop in Strasbourg as we had been there last year but continued along the canal through the gentle rolling country of the Alsace plain to Saverne where we were going to stop.
Alas there was no room in the inn so we carried on 10 more km to Lutzelbourg, wedged into a narrow wooded valley that crosses the Vosges Mountains. It is very pretty place but unfortunately the rain came that night and all the next day so we sat still, played with fuel filters and did some shopping for a wedding present at the beautiful crystal works in the town.
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The weather forecast is not good for this week but we have time on hand to take it easy and wait for the clearer weather. We head west this week to the Sarre Canal and then along that until we reach Saarbrucken in Germany and start our descent of the River Saar which is a tributary of the Mosel River which in turn is a tributary of the Rhine. 900km to go but very few locks.
