Alsace is beautiful. I fell in love with Alsace.
No matter where we went we were ooohing and aaahing over the beauty of the scenery. The first time we went to Switzerland we felt like that too. Every time you moved your eye, it was a post card perfect scene.
The Vosage mountains must be very old, because they are gentle and tree-covered. At least they seem gentle to someone who lives next door to the Rockies. I’m sure that like Scotland’s Cairngorms, they are brooding and foreboding, and can be dangerous to the inattentive or careless climber or hiker.
But from where we were in the comfort of a city street, a cultivated path or a car on a highway in good weather, they were gentle and welcoming. (Well, let me qualify that a bit. The roads into the Vosages were filled with hairpin curves usually several in a row much like the original roads through the Rockies, and had no shoulders or railings making them a little hair raising and made for cautious driving.)
It’s fall here, and the leaves are just starting to change colour. Gold and brown with very occasional red mixed in with the greens of the coniferous trees on gently folding hills with occasional chateau ruins scattered on various heights of land make for stunning views. There must be a million shades of green in nature.
Then you turn your head just a little and as far as the eye can see, vineyards, also golden in the fall light, grapes long harvested, pruning for next year still in the future. The sky is a softer blue than you get in the Mediterranean areas or the prairies and a gentle haze softens any hard edges that might be there.
Towns are so close together they are separated only by a line on a map in city hall and a sign saying you are leaving one town and entering another. And sometimes, by one or two kilometres. Standing on any elevated piece of land gives you a view of at least five or six villages.
AAAAHHHH, Alsace.
I don’t know if this is an unusual fall or if it is always this way.
Ken and I speculated that because no one seems to be in a rush to harvest the corn crops we see all over the place, that the fact that several of the markets we have been to are selling bedding plants, which prairie folks only see in spring, that we have seen several fields filled with what looks like flowering canola, and that we have seen several field of two or three inch high newly germinated crops, that this is fall the way it always, or at least usually occurs.
Doesn’t matter.
I am still gobsmacked by the fact that flowers are blooming everywhere we go. And I don’t mean a few scraggly remains of summer, I mean huge displays of flowers. In pots, in gardens, along roadsides. Blooming flowers, in full glory. And the grass is green, and most of the trees are still covered in green leaves. Yesterday (Nov. 1) we had the air conditioning on in the car!
I digress. Back to the glories of Alsace.
Then there’s the architecture. I think I took pictures of every house in the town we were staying in (Ribeauville — acute accent on that last e) and every neighbouring town we walked through.
The timbered houses are stunning, even the ruins.
And their colours are glorious. Blue, turquoise, purple, shocking pink, bright orange, bright yellow, gold, occasional white and sand, red, green, everything but dots, checks and tartans. I was jealous of the colours. At home, our landscape is white all winter and brown in the spring and fall, and we are placed in subdivisions with architectural guidelines that usually frown on any colours other than white, sand or cream.
In the medieval part of towns, houses are all joined at the side walls, but the roof heights and shapes are all different, as are the colours. Just because you’re joined to your neighbour doesn’t mean you have to be the same colour! I saw one door lintel with a date carved in it. 1556. The timbers are worn and warped. But there’s a glorious symmetry to them. The timber frames all seem to have the same basic pattern….even the ones being built today… with horizontal timbers being supported (or perhaps supporting) diagonal timbers.
They even have fun with the roof. Usually the roofs are red clay or tiles. But some we saw were multi coloured forming beautiful geometric almost floral patterns of green, red, blue and yellow.
Inside, because they are timbered houses not stone houses, they are brighter than some of the equally old stone houses. Stone house walls are usually three feet thick which means the windows don’t let much light in. No such problem with the timbered houses. Then there’s the exposed beams in the ceilings. Our rented apartment was on the first floor of a three floor house of flats (so up one flight of stairs), and had exposed beams. The ceilings were high enough that heads weren’t threatened by the beams as they have been in other houses we’ve rented on vacations.
Bringing 500 year old houses into the 21st century must be an interesting challenge, plumbing for example, especially running water. We noticed that floors in all the toilet and water closet rooms were raised a couple of inches above the floor level of the rest of the house, probably to contain the piping. And wiring…well, I’m not sure how they did that. I don’t care. They did and these lovely old timbered houses are likely good for another 500 years.
I filled entire scan discs with photos of these beauteous houses, but i won’t bore you with all of them. We have moved on to Burgundy and our vacation house here has WIFI of sorts. It is fussy and sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. It has only let me download two photos, so that is all I am including. I’ll add others lately. Imagine the vineyards and trees, and more of these lovely houses in all colours.
