It’s been a few days since the last blog entry, but that was because I figured I should just do one entry about my time in Bordeaux. Unlike my time in Alsace and Burgundy, my visit to Bordeaux has been about one thing, and one thing only: wine. So I left Beaune on Thursday morning. I had toyed with the idea of visiting Perigueux along the way, but as it turned out, I would have reached there about 4:30pm and that was a bit late to see much. The drive across to Bordeaux was over 6 hours, so I wasn’t going to be feeling like doing much anyway. The drive was pretty good though. There wasn’t much traffic, and even though I was on highways and motorways the whole time, the scenery ranged from nice to ... read more

One of the things I find endlessly fascinating about history is learning how things were done in the past, without the benefits of modern civilisation. No long distant communications, no electricity, no computers, relatively simple (or even flat-out wrong) science. It’s hard to visit a medieval castle and not wonder how you would go about building such an impressive construction without any of these things. On Monday, I set out to find out how. Well, not really. I’ve read books and seen documentaries about this kind of thing. But quite a few documentaries I have enjoyed watching feature the castle of Guedelon in France, and it was somewhere I had been keen to visit for quite a while. Guedelon castle is a long-running project to build a medieval castle using only medieval techniques. This means no ... read more

It was back on the history trail on Friday as I headed to the new (since I last visited France) museum at Alise-Saint-Reine, north of Beaune. I was really looking forward to visiting the museum which covers the battle of Alesia, the last major battle in Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. I have read much about the battle, so I didn’t expect to learn much from the museum, but I wanted to see the place I had read so much about. I left Beaune after breakfast, and the drive took about an hour and a half as I still have the gps set to avoid tolls. I am really liking the drives I take off the motorways and the drive to Alise-Saint-Reine was no exception. The weather wasn’t the best, with some light rain along the ... read more

Monday was my last day in Alsace and I decided to check out somewhere that hadn’t originally been on my list of places to visit. The town of Neuf-Brisach was the last fortification designed by Louis XIV’s famed architect Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban and is one of the best preserved. The town is just past Colmar, so I thought it would make for an easier day than driving all the way up to the Maginot Line fortress of Fort du Hackenberg, which would be about as far as Verdun was. The drive to Neuf-Brisach was about 45 minutes, but very pretty and not a lot of traffic, which was nice. On the way, I saw a sign for a Maginot Line memorial museum which I decided to check out on the way back, just to ... read more

Friday morning I spent finishing up the last blog and then had a nap. So I didn’t head out to Colmar until the early afternoon. I managed to figure out how to stop the gps from taking me onto the motorway all the time, which was nice, but it still wasn’t happy when I drove to Colmar following the Route des Vins. I’m sure if somebody else was driving, the Route des Vins would be a very different experience, but as I could not drink my way down the road, I had to be satisfied with an enjoyable drive through lots and lots of vineyards. It’s tough, I know, but somebody has to do it. I arrived in Colmar with little plan about seeing anything in particular. I only really knew that it was a picturesque ... read more