Strasbourg

On Nov 21, we visited Strasbourg, France.  Our ship docked on the east side of the Rhine, in Kehl, Germany, and we walked to a bus that drove us over the bridge into Strasbourg.  There we did a short bus tour past some EU buildings, and then got off for a walking tour and a few hours of free time.

We started out in the Petite France district of the old town, which is on an island formed by the splitting of the Ill River.

We gradually made our way to the cathedral.  It's breathtaking, although it's hard to get a good picture of it as the town closes in on it from all sides.  Here we approach from a side street:

Inside there is a famous astronomical clock from 1843 (there had been earlier versions going back to the 14th century).  It has a perpetual calendar, phases of the moon, indicates solar and lunar eclipses, and other interesting features:

After the cathedral, we had a few hours to walk around the old town:

Many stores were decorated very nicely for Christmas:

Ed and I visited the local history museum, where they had a model of the city representing the 1600's or so?  I can't remember exactly which century, but it shows how it looked when it was a fortified city:

The Rhine river followed different channels at that time, and they were well depicted in the model:

One of the branches of the river we saw after the museum:

The morning was overcast, but the sun came out weakly later in the afternoon and we got some better photos of the cathedral as we waited for the guide to walk us to a bus pick-up zone (due to the narrow streets, tour buses can't go into the centre of the town).

We loved Strasbourg, I think it was my favourite city that we visited during the cruise.  It's a shame we were only there for one day, there was lots more that could have been explored.

Breisach

In the afternoon of Nov. 20, after touring the Black Forest in the morning, we headed up the hill from where the ship was docked to walk around the town of Breisach.

The weather was foggy.  The town was very nice, it's a small town but has a very long history, and was a centre of trade and government activities from Roman times until maybe the 1700's or so.

I'll just post a few photos.  I liked this model at the local history museum of what the city looked like in centuries gone by, I think it represents how the town looked in medieval times:

One of the gates to the city, at the south end of the high part of town.   There is a sloping road that leads up to it.

Looking down over the lower town, which is newer but still old by North American standards:

Gate at the north end of the upper town (which was the fortified section of town back in the day):

I forget what this tower was for, but it's in the middle of the upper town:

This wall is one of the old fortifications, we are standing on another part of it and looking across:

View of the upper town from the south:

We loved Briesach, and were glad we had time to look around a bit.

Black Forest

Around a month or two ago I processed dozens of photos from our drive through and visit to the Black Forest, back on Nov 20, 2019, the second day of our Viking cruise.  Since then I did a backup and purge of my computer files due to the hard disk being full ... and somehow the processed photos seem to have been skipped from the backup.  The originals are there, but I can't face the task of going through them and improving them again.  It's too bad I didn't post them right away after I processed them, but I got busy with other stuff for a while.

So, here are the five that I processed the day of the trip and posted to Facebook.  They give a good idea of what the black forest looks like - basically hilly farm land with woodlots.  The day we went had snow, so it looked kind of Canadian to me, reminded me a lot of home.  These were taken on the bus to a tourist resort where we saw Cuckoo clocks and had a black-forest cake making demonstration.

Maybe I will come back and post some more photos at some point, but this might be as good as it gets.  It was beautiful there!