Yep, another long hike… but this time on the other side of France in the Alsatian region. Alsace is a very German part of France because this area has been part of Germany in the past. Many people still speak German and the regional food also is a bit similar with a lot of pretzels, spaetzle, flammenkuche (thin crust white sauce pizzas), and choucroute (sauerkraut dish with pork). The wine region is about 65 miles long in a strip along the leeward side of the hills and dotted with about 120 small wine-making villages. We spent a couple of days here in Colmar many years ago with our kids and loved it, so when we saw there was a way to hike through Alsace wine route, we jumped on it.
This time, we took a long evening train and started with a night in our end point – Strasbourg. We were able to store our big bags there and then just take our small backpacks on a train to Colmar the next morning. We took in the cutesy tourist town of Colmar for a day, taking way too many photos and getting started on eating all our favorite Alsatian foods. We spent the night, and the next morning we took a short city bus to start hiking in the suburbs of Colmar.
The hike was actually on a Europe bike route #5 that goes from London to Italy following an old Roman pilgrim route. We didn’t see too many hikers besides some local dog walkers but we did see a few cyclists on bike tours. Many people were just riding through the wine route for a weekend ride but we saw some bikers carrying enough equipment for a long distance tour. As a cyclist, I was a little jealous seeing all those bikes zoom by us while were were walking but that wasn’t really what we were after. The first day, we went through several towns and got to see a lot of stuff in 10 miles that we wouldn’t have seen on a 50 mile bike touring day. The villages at the start of this hike were busy with a lot of open wineries and tasting rooms. We stopped for lunch at the town of Riquewihr and were surprised about how many people were in this town on a Saturday for wine tasting and seeing the old buildings of the wine-making town. This would continue for the rest of the first day passing several more beautiful towns until we made it to the very popular town of Ribeauville where we had reserved a hotel over a boulangerie (bakery). I was blown away by how many old timber exposed houses that were over 200 years old. Some way older. I knew we would be seeing some… but there are thousands of these houses in Alsace. We kind of got used to them.
The next day was a long hiking day (16 miles) so we got on the trail early. We made good time and at we arrived at our planned lunch town a little to early for lunch at 11:30 (in rural France, restaurants open for lunch from 12-2, not before, not after). So we kept going… big mistake! We were now still going through cute old wine making towns but many of these towns didn’t have the tourists…. or restaurants. We entered the town of Scherwiller at 12:30 and found the one restaurant in town. They turned us away because we didn’t have reservations. It is now Sunday afternoon, and we aren’t seeing any grocery stores or restaurants open for miles. At this point, we realized that even our Airbnb town didn’t have much open on Sunday and the most of the lunch restaurants closed at 2pm. Our hiking pace increased. We ended up eventually finding a “brunch buffet” spot in a hotel that was a lot more than we wanted to pay but it was a very good French meal at 1 pm. We eventually got to our destination town of Dambach La Ville and found one store open that sold us some wine. We took that to our airbnb and came up with a plan on how we would survive the next 2 nights in this town that didn’t have many services open on Sunday night or even a Monday. There was one restaurant open on Sunday night but nothing open all day Monday. Dambach does have a train station so we decided to take our “rest” day seeing the larger town of Selestat that was only a 10 minute train away and seemed to have a lot more services. On Monday, we ate sandwiches at a convience store in Dambach and then took the train to walk around Selestat. It was raining, and there wasn’t much to see so we just ended up going from bar to bar to taste local wine and wait for dinner. We ended up at a restaurant where we would have another drink until their kitchen opened up at 6pm and we could eat before taking the last train back to our town at 7:15 pm. Unfortunately, 6pm came and went and we realized that the kitchen was going to be a while. There were 3 guys in there working on the hood over the stove and it didn’t like we were going to get any food before the train left. We ended up giving up, hopping on the train and eating a dinner consisting of train station vending machine food, and leftovers and hiking snacks back at our Airbnb. We learned a good lesson on hiking in small towns on Sundays and Mondays. The next day we would be hiking through more and more vineyards to the much bigger town on Obernai.
In every town we were in during this whole 5 day hike, there was a lot of activity in town and in the fields because the grapes were ripe. We saw a lot of pickers and a lot of tractors transporting to the grapes to get crushed. In the small towns, everyone seems to be taking a part of the harvest. It is a small town event and many of the field workers were just friends and family that use the harvest to come together as a community. It seemed like making wine is the only industry and everyone in these small towns worked in the wine industry in some way. Many of the pickers were older than us and have been doing this for many years. M and I had a winemaking phase in our life a few years ago, so we are familiar with the harvest and the winemaking crush in the fall. It was really fun to see it happening in France and was one of the reasons we really enjoyed this hike.
The last days were a little bit the same as the first. It is wonderful to walk through the fields and the small wine towns but it started getting to be a bit of the same. We were able to do some winetasting at the bigger wineries but the smaller wineries were all a bit too busy with the grape harvest and aren’t set up for wine tasting. We learned a lot on these 2 French hikes and we are still assimilating our thoughts on what this means to future hikes and possibly doing a Camino de Santiago. I will try to summarize our thoughts in a future post. Now, we have reunited with our rolly bags and are going to spend 3 nights seeing the sights of Strasbourg. It is our anniversary and we are going to celebrating finishing the hikes as well as our marriage!
