Ribeauville

Alternate title: To Moose Jaw. You've never seen someone so captivated by a city name as Yann is with Moose Jaw. All day today we drank our toasts to it, and, having sufficiently educated him, to Saskatoon's health and Regina's demise. We also got bored of Moose Jaw and began toasting Yellowknife and affiliates.

Anyway, enough on that. Today Yann took me to the legendary Wine Road running through Ascance. We got to the train station and sat on the train waiting for it to depart... and waiting and waiting. Finally we discovered that the train had been cancelled and so we waited some more for it to leave at the next scheduled time. Such was an omen for our day.

We got to the village we thought was Ribeauville but was in fact so small a village that the train station had been named for the more famous town 4km away. Which we discovered by chatting with a local who kindly gave us a lift in to town and specifically to his friend's restaurant. We ate some traditional French food, a feast Yann insisted on treating me to, complete with Kir for an appertif, a wine made near town, and dessert after the fact. The man is uncommonly generous and I really enjoy hanging around with him and his family, it makes me sad to leave tomorrow... but the trek must go on.

Anyway, our day had been cut sufficiently short but we walked after lunch (slowly, I'd not eaten that much food in years) up a hill through some vineyards, making our way to a castle we'd seen. The vineyards turned to forest and the path turned into nothing and soon we reached a clearing and realized we still had a good way to go. So we turned back and walked down the hill, into town, and strolled around there. The hike up was sufficient to require further liquid, so we stopped off for a drink.

We caught a cab back to the train station and awaited our train, which did not come. Mostly because it was a bus and we'd somehow missed the fine print, so we had to pay more to go further down the line and come back since there were no more trains stopping here in the direction we wanted. So we did that and arrived back in Strasbourg by a rather lucky guess I made on which train appeared to be correct, and spent the evening talking and relaxing and looking at their photos of Oregon and Quebec. Both were nice but I was especially surprised at the scenery in Oregon. Western Oregon is quite different from what I saw near the coast. And it seemed to me that if a person is only after scenery there's plenty in North America to see for anyone. With that thought in mind, I set up a slightly more relaxed itinerary leading up to my Scandinavian tour, hopefully allowing me to soak in a little more from those towns instead of running through them like a madman. Nothing set in stone, but a rough plan which will take me through Munich, Prague, Krakow, and Berlin in the next 10 days. I suppose that sounds ambitious, but Munich scarcely counts because I've been there before and am not spending much time there. It's basically 3 days per city.

So, that's the plan and what's been going on. See you soon.