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Obernai Exit, Nancy Pass, Roadside Stop

December 7, 201

Dear Friends and Family,

(Producer's note: The author is hopelessly behind in finishing diaries. It's now been two weeks between the events and the writing and memories are fading fast. Hopefully this is a temporary change because we really do like having diaries where a more full current is being recorded.)

We left Obernai, bound for Nancy. We were not going on the most direct path because the journey is the thing, not just the destination. Today, that was truer than ever.

Our first stop was a hilltop castle called Haut-Koenigsbourg. The castle sits atop a hill that dominates the surrounding farmlands. The castle was first mentioned in the 12th Century but little is known from that period except that it guarded a trade crossroad. It was easy to envision how the high fortress could dominate the area. Over the centuries it was expanded, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed and swapped between German and French masters. That's pretty much the story of this area generally. It was finally restored under the German Kaiser in the early 20th Century. At the end of World War I, France became the owner of this territory including the freshly restored castle.

For our visit we had a wonderful sunny day. The view was wonderful. Inside, we could wander through rooms that had been restored 100 years ago but which still held furniture from 400 years before that. Even the graffiti carved in the red sandstone walls was old. Overall, I'd rate this as one of our best castles so far, not for a particular feature or special opulence, but just because we could tell this had been a working castle, guarding the territory, not just an ornate summer place.

With this successful stop under our belt, we headed to Baccarat for lunch. The road was pleasant and the rolling countryside as picture-perfect as the French Tourism Bureau could want it. In Baccarat, there was a nice enough town center and "Hotel de Ville". By now we understand that this means City Hall and not a place where we should look for a room. Too bad, this one was pretty cute.

We chose lunch before looking at Baccarat's famous crystal. Now we could tell we were in France because lunch took almost two hours. This would be an OK pace but we were already running a bit behind, so a quick spin through the crystal store (no pictures allowed) and we were down the road. This is just as well because some of the crystal pieces ran into the thousands of dollars and our schedule prevented buying (and our budget, our space, our common sense).

We hit the outskirts of Nancy at about 4:00. We had only a general map of the area and Nancy is a pretty fair sized city. Nevertheless, we almost didn't get lost. Almost. In fact we followed the freeway into the "center" and then got swept by traffic out again to a suburb. We wandered around there for a bit and managed to drive back to the center of town.

We even managed to drive into a parking garage and turn off the car. Then we talked about what we had seen so far and concluded that the Nancy we had just spent over an hour driving into and around was a lot less interesting than the Nancy described in our Lonely Planet guidebook. We looked at each other and said, "Let's leave".

Now we were in violation of one of our most useful rules: find a hotel early. Not only that, but we didn't even know where we might find a hotel since acceptable roadside places have not been very common in our European travels. We told ourselves that something quaint will probably turn up, but first we had to get on the toll road toward Dijon.

Trust me, there is nothing quaint on the toll road. We did find one establishment at a rest stop but, after examining the room, we concluded that we were not yet desperate enough, so we drove on. At that point, we decided to get off the toll road because we could tell this was not good hotel hunting grounds. We immediately saw another roadside hotel and debated the wisdom of this very plain place versus a "quaint hotel around the bend". We stopped and checked out the room. It was tiny and had a peculiar odor, but it seemed clean. This was better than the last place, still a budget bargain and it was getting late. We took it.

Ultimately, it was just fine. It was family run and everyone was friendly. The next morning we had breakfast in the dining room with a cozy fire and "talked" to family. They talked French, we talked English but it worked. All in all, an OK stop but not one that will show up in tourist guidebooks.

On the way out the next morning, we looked for all those "quaint hotels along the roadside" that we had expected? They never happened. The patron saint of tourists had watched over us again.

Take care and don't tell us if Nancy was too good to have been missed.

John and Marianne.

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