After our hikes, we really should have put in a week or two of downtime to rest up and slowly get back into our regular tourist mode. Instead we spent 3 nights in Strasbourg and then 4 nights in Beaune. In Beaune, we actually spent 1 day renting a car to look for some family roots, and then another day checking out the town of Dijon. We weren’t really in the mood for checking out more new French towns, but we were doing it. I’m afraid we don’t have too many fun stories that made an interesting blog, but I can share some of our best pictures.
Strasbourg is a pretty big town and is famous for being the home of the European parliament. It has rivers that surround the inner old city that is filled with great architecture, tourist and christmas shops, and lots of cafes and restaurants on pedestrian only streets and the rivers. We checked out a few history and art museums and then checked out the star attraction of the town- the Strasbourg cathedral. It has a huge gothic spire and is famous for its atomic clock built hundreds of years ago. We stayed the 3 nights here which was fine… but a was furnished a bit weird and was a little cramped.
Beaune is a much smaller town in the middle of the Burgandy wine region. It it was surrounded by several big wineries but we didn’t end up visiting any tasting rooms. Tasting fees was 25 Euros and up, which was a little too high end for us. We did our burgandy wine tasting by picking out bottles in the wine stores and grocery stores. We also enjoyed smelling the crushing of grapes everywhere, because it is still harvest season. Beaune’s big attraction was a charity hospital that started during the middle ages. It has been restored into a museum and was really interesting. During our travels, we toured lots of castles, forts, churches and museums, but we have never toured a hospital. Our airbnb was pretty good but a little small.
We rented a car to look for my ancestors old towns and the next day we had to return the car to Dijon. We ended up spending the day in Dijon seeing what it had to offer. It is another touristic town with a lot of great architecture, a few museums, churches, and a big market that wasn’t too crowded. It was raining a bit so we just saw the big sites and left. We feel like we didn’t really have the time to investigate Strasbourg or Dijon and could spend a month in either of these places if we can ever find a way to slow our travel down. Maybe next year.
Next stop- we are leaving the mainland and heading to the biggest French Island- Corsica! We need to take a train to Lyon, have lunch, then take another long train to the Med and then a 12 hour overnight ferry.