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Published: October 12th 2010
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So one french oral examination, one french paper analyzing les miserables, another english paper about renewable energy, and 80 or so kilometers later, I'm writing to you after busiest week I've had yet!
So, after the first stressful week of classes where all this work was finally due, myself and four of my classmates rented bikes and headed off to Barr to begin the Route des Vins. First, I think it will be helpful to have a bit of background on each of our respective bicycle-riding skills, as this greatly influenced our journey. Starting with me, I have always ridden a mountain bike, but not in recent years, so although I was rusty and I was riding a bike without suspension, I never fell.
Hannah- probably the best biker among us, she has done downhill singletrack, so the whole trip was well within her abilities.
Alex- he was in the same position as me, but he has yet to master the technique of sticking with the group, so he often got separated.
Liz- she hadn't ridden a bike in quite a while, and had done even less cardio, so the hills were not her favorite part.
Jenny- Jenny learned to ride a bike when she was 16, and has thus spent very little time on her bike skills, which is why we titled our adventure "Jenny re-learns how to ride a bike"
We took a train to Barr, and I had the unenviable task of hanging all of our gigantic bicycles up. By the time I had hung up the final one, it was almost time to take them down again. After the few requisite minutes of being lost, we found our way to the route des vins in Barr, and began our journey! Because bike rentals took so long, and because we don't like to get up early, our journey began at 2 PM, which proved to be a problem, since we failed to take into account the fact that we had to be in Chatenois by sunset, and that the route des vins has a lot of hills! So feeling good after one small "degustation" where we tried some local wines and bought a nice bottle for our couch-surfing hosts (more on this soon), we set out on a break-neck (ie: very slow and consistent for Jenny) pace with little to no hope of making it to Chatenois before dark. Luckily for us, geography was on our side, and we were able to coast more than half the way along miles and miles of vineyards. The route des vins was simply gorgeous, we passed by fields of grape vines that were just turning for autumn, through small towns like Damsbach-la-ville (my favorite) with grapevine trellises spanning over the roads and half-timbered houses full of flowerbeds. These few hours were beyond words, coasting along through the sun was truly something special, and I finally truly understood why my dad goes on motorcycle tours. When we arrived in Chatenois as the sun was setting, we had another quick degustation to celebrate our first successful day, then reluctantly placed our very sore gluteus maximus muscles back on the bikes and cycled the short distance to our couch-surfing hosts.
A brief aside about what coach-surfing is: there is a website called www.couchsurfing.com, where you find hosts that you can stay with for free. This is obviously almost too good a deal to be true, which made us very nervous about whether we were going to be murdered by our future hosts. Luckily, nothing was further from the truth; our hosts were beyond generous, and made us dinner, breakfast, and even gave us a kougelhopf as a snack for the road. Although they are just one example, all throughout the weekend, we only met the kindest Alsatian people, who bent over backwards for even our group of americans on horrible green rental bikes.
Anyways, after a great nights sleep, we embarked on what would become probably the most challenging day I've had since I came to Europe. In the morning, we met up with Jackie, another friend joining us for the day, and we made lots of progress, did a little degustation (where I purchased a delicious grand cru muscat) , then had a traditional alsatian lunch of tarte flambee in the town of Ribeauvillé. Still, after lunch, we realized the time (4:10), and even more distressingly, the distance we still had to cover (more than half). Jackie's train departed from our destination, Colmar, at 6:09, so she and I set off pedaling as hard as we could to try and make her train. A note about French signage, it is the worst signage in the world. Given this fact, we half-guessed our way from town to town, picking roads at random, until we reached the outskirts of Colmar. There, a scooter which ran off the road ran over our bikes, which we were very luckily not on. Somehow, the scooter was more damaged than our bikes, so we went on our way as if nothing had happened. Once we got into the center of Colmar, we were in crunch-time, with only 20 minutes to go, and again we battled with misleading French signs pointing to the Gare. After 3 or 4 rounds of following the signs, getting lost, then asking for directions, we finally stumbled onto rue de la gare, and Jackie made it with 7 minutes to spare! However, this was just the warmup; Jenny had gotten sick in Ribeauvillé, and with no way of continuing on, they had to find a taxi which could carry two people and their monstrously large bikes. Although I have no idea how, they actually managed this feat for 35 euros, and part two of the crisis was averted. Now all that remained was for Hannah and Alex to somehow bike the distance jackie and I barely covered in two hours, and all before the sun set in an hour. Again, somehow miraculously, they managed this feat by riding along a 90km/ hr highway that went directly to Colmar. Needless to say, when we were all reunited at the hostel, we were all relieved and utterly exhausted. We treated ourselves to a very nice meal, which we felt was fairly well-deserved, then crashed at the hostel. Having no desire for a repeat of Saturday, we spent a leisurely day in Colmar, seeing sights like the Issenheim alterpiece and petite venise (which is truly petite, it spans about one block!) Now I'm back in Strasbourg, fully rested, and planning my next trip. To Paris, Rome, and Florence!
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