Alsace and southern France

Between the two larger trips, we drove with our motorhome for almost two weeks from Villingen through France. We found parking spaces using the convenient Park4Night app for motorhome travel and stayed there for one night.

After a day in Freiburg, we drove to our first parking space in Colmar in Alsace. After dealing with Argentine Spanish, Chilean Spanish, and Bolivian Spanish recently, we now had to deal with French... French. The main difficulty was actually making sure to always say 'Oui' instead of 'Sí'. By the way, being in France had another advantage for us: Since we are currently not insured through an employer or the employment agency, but have taken out foreign travel health insurance for this period, which only applies abroad, we were probably not insured during our unplanned stay in Germany...

In Colmar, we treated ourselves to an original Alsatian flammkuchen in the evening. The next day we visited the beautiful old town, simply following the GPSmyCity app, which didn't tell us everything about the sights in the free version, but at least told us where the sights were. We also walked through a district located on a river, which is called 'Little Venice' because of its beautiful bridges.

The next city we visited was Besançon, where we mainly visited the citadel. From its wall, we had a great view of the city, and inside there was a small zoo. We didn't see all the animals, but for a zoo it's a good sign when the animals have some peace and quiet. There were also museums, but we didn't have time for them and we already had a nice day.

After a pure driving day further south, we arrived in the city of Orange, where there is a well-preserved Roman triumphal arch and a Roman theater. In the latter, we were able to attend music rehearsals for upcoming events with orchestra, children's choir, and solo singing. On the way back to the motorhome, we also passed by a stage of a jazz festival taking place in the city, although we didn't really like the singing.

We had set ourselves the goal of reaching the Mediterranean coast as our final destination. However, as it turned out, there are few good parking spaces where you are protected from break-ins. Therefore, we decided to stay for three nights at a safe campsite in Avignon, and from there we also took a train to Marseille for a day. We are not typical campsite customers, but we quite liked it here. The only annoying thing was that in the evening we had to walk relatively long from the city center of Avignon back to the campsite because the ferry across the Rhone no longer operated. First, we explored Avignon. We quite liked the augmented reality-guided tour with tablets provided to us in the Papal Palace, where popes of the 14th century had their seat. (Elsewhere, we had already experienced more embarrassing things under the trendy term 'augmented reality'...) The only downside was that not all of the selfies we took with our tablets, which were inserted into various backgrounds, were later sent to us by email, but apparently a human being made a selection beforehand. A woman in a papal gown probably didn't fit in - and yet Judith wanted to be pope too... The audio guide on the famous bridge of Avignon, which actually only partially exists anymore, was rather ridiculous because seemingly random signs were placed along the bridge, and the audio guide just told us something about the bridge. This audio guide was probably meant to justify the relatively high entrance fee for a more or less simple (and no longer functional) bridge. We also found the additional entrance fee for the gardens of the Papal Palace to be overpriced.

The visit to Marseille, including the train ride, was a particularly long day. After countless visits to Paris, Sebastian simply wanted to see the second largest city in France without thinking beforehand that it might not be beautiful. Fortunately, it has become much more beautiful in the past 10 years, as it was the European Capital of Culture in 2013 and they apparently made every effort to spruce it up. However, the first impression was not convincing yet, because on our visit day, the cleaning company responsible for the train station did not work and the rubbish bins there were already overflowing. Once again, we took part in a free walking tour and visited, among other things, the cathedral, which was actually very beautiful. Afterwards, we took a bus to another large church on a hill (Basilique Notre-Dame de la Garde), from where we had a good view of the city and the sea. Then we walked back down the hill and to a small city beach. It was a very hot day. The fact that there seem to be few to no parks in the city, as we noticed, didn't help either. At least we were able to cool off in the sea before we drove back to Avignon. After walking the long way from the train station back to the campsite, we set a new record for daily walking distance on our previous trip(s) - the previous record was still from our arrival day in Buenos Aires.

The next day, we drove down from the campsite in Avignon and first went to Aix-en-Provence. We walked along the magnificent Cours Mirabeau and then explored the old town. We really enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere of this city: beautiful streets large and small with many fountains, and there was always music coming from somewhere. Here we finally ate some crêpes. We also bought Calissons, a Provençal candy that unfortunately did not survive the trip in our backpacks until we got home, but even in a deformed state, it still tasted very good.

The next day, storms were forecasted for southern France, so it was best for us to have a driving day back towards the distant Black Forest and try to avoid the heavy rain. We succeeded quite well and experienced most of the rain when we were already taking a break anyway.

On the next day, during the rest of our journey home, we made a small stopover. In order to have some nature between the many cities, we drove to the Gorges du Fier, a gorge that Judith already knew and found beautiful at the time. We leisurely walked along the narrow paved path between the rocks.

On the way back, we drove a little further north from our starting point to also visit the city of Strasbourg. First, we walked around the old town a bit, then we visited Strasbourg Cathedral and climbed the cathedral tower, from where we enjoyed the view. After that, we saw a nearby boat dock on the Ill River, whose branches flow along the edges of the old town, and decided to take a canal tour. During the tour, we were given various information about the city, and we also visited the important EU institutions and briefly visited the picturesque district of La Petite France, which is also called 'Little Venice' because of its small canals and bridges. So the circle was complete, as there was already a Little Venice in Colmar. Overall, we have now visited many different Venices: two 'Little Venices' (parts of Colmar and Strasbourg), two 'Venices of the North' (Amsterdam and Bruges), the 'Venice of Westphalia' (Lippstadt), and the real 'Venice' (Venice). If anyone knows another Venice - we are open to more excursion suggestions. In the evening, we only drove a few more kilometers towards Germany to a parking space that was still in France so that we would still be insured for another day.

Back in Germany, we also explored Karlsruhe. Since Karlsruhe is the 21st largest city in Germany, this visit was the logical continuation of our series of excursions 'The 20 largest cities in Germany' (we visited the 19 largest, and we live in the 20th largest). It was another very hot day, and the city wasn't so crowded, probably because of the heat. We only walked from Europaplatz to Marktplatz, then to the castle, where a science festival was taking place, and then we met Judith's mother at Judith's great-aunt's house, who lives here. The next day we had another family gathering nearby and then finally drove back to Villingen. During these days, the unrest in France broke out following the death of a 17-year-old during a police check, which we did not notice anymore.

We didn't have much time left to clean the motorhome and unpack our luggage because two days later we had our flight to Seattle.