Alsace, a random castle in France, and Costco!

As some of you may know, the boss has been under a little bit of stress associated with her employment, and frequent readers of this blog may have noticed a little bit of a pattern:

1. Boss gets stressed out.
2. We take a trip.

We'd been kicking around the idea of taking a long weekend, but Friday arrived and we hadn't made any decisions. Her office went out to lunch offsite and closed up early, so she walked through the door at around 2:00 on Friday afternoon, and her "greeting" to me wasn't "Hi," or "Honey, I'm home!" She said, and I quote:

"My whole goal for this weekend is to have a glass of wine, outside, somewhere pretty."

Funny thing about it... I'm pretty sure I had her convinced that our deck was "pretty," as she was literally sitting at the table we have outside with a glass of wine before we somehow decided to pack and hit the road. Forty five minutes later, we were on our way out of town.

We had three reasons for choosing France as our destination:

1. Germany closes down on Sundays. France is one of four relatively close countries that isn't closed on Sunday. (Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands being the others)
2. We're Costco members. There are multiple Costco locations in France, the closest one being in Mulhouse, right across the border from Basel, Switzerland.
3. We have visitors coming in a couple of months, and we rationalized that our trip could be considered "research" if you squint really hard and tilt your head in just the right direction.

So... we hit the road a little before 3, and were checking into the Holiday Inn by dinnertime. No, that's not a euphemism. I'll try and minimize it throughout the blog, but there were multiple times throughout the weekend where I said "I'm not a _______, but I *did* stay in a Holiday Inn last night."

The hotel is in what feels a bit like a business park, with an Italian restaurant on one side and a steak house on the other. Yes, of course we ate at both of them.

After checking in, we headed down to the Italian place for dinner. Decent enough food, and the waiter spoke an almost intelligible version of English... which is lucky, as my French is limited to "yes,""no,""good morning,""goodbye," and "do you speak English?" His English was much better than my French, which we appreciated.

The restaurant in the hotel was closed for renovations and breakfast in the Italian restaurant was around €20 per person, so I found a nearby grocery store the next morning and ran out to get some pastries... lemme tell ya, grocery store pastries in France are better than pastries from a bakery in just about any other country! After breakfast, we hit the road heading north.

Let's talk geography for a moment. It's been a while since our last trip to Alsace, so a quick refresher:

The border between France and Germany is largely formed by the Rhine River, a major European waterway. Strasbourg sits on the border with Germany. Directly below Strasbourg is the Alsace region, along the western side of the Rhine River.

Alsace is the primary white wine area of France, and there's a "Wine Trail" around 170 kilometers (110 Freedom Units) long that passes through 67 different cities or villages. 

We drove north from Mulhouse toward Strasbourg. Our plan was to take the highway north, and take the local road back south through the little villages, but we hadn't discussed how far north we'd go before turning around. Dear reader, I made a mistake. I've taken a screenshot from Google Maps - see if you can catch my mistake (I've helpfully circled it for you):

Do you see those blurry pixels on that hilltop? I pointed those out to the boss.

Next stop... some random castle on a random hilltop in France. When will I learn my lesson, dear reader?

Since the Alsace region has transferred back and forth between the Germans and French for so long, a lot of the places in that area have two names. Such is the story of that castle. In French, it's called Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg, while in German, it's Hohkönigsburg. Since I'm more familiar with German, I'll use the German name for it from here on out.

The site where Hohkönigsburg is located was first mentioned on a deed issued by Charlemagne in 774. In 854, the hill was in the possession of the Basilica of St. Denis (in Paris), and was the site of a monastery. There are no records of when the castle was built there, but in 1147, the monks from that monastery complained to King Louis VII of the castle's unlawful construction by Frederick II, the Duke of Swabia. He was Duke from 1105 until 1147, so I'm assuming that means it was built right around then.

Ownership of the castle passed from Duchy to Duchy, including to those pesky Habsburgs who have made so many appearances in these blog entries.

The castle was burned and looted a handful of times over the years, including by Swedish forces in the Thirty Years' War. Oddly enough, I'm pretty sure that's the first time I've had to share a story about the Swedes burning and looting something.

It lay in ruins for a couple hundred years, until it was presented to Kaiser Wilhelm II. He decided to rebuild and modernize it, in an attempt to legitimize the Hohenzollern family (his family) as the rulers of the Empire, and confirm his own worthiness as the heir to the (pesky) Habsburg Empire.

There are evidently a couple of levels of recognition for historic places in France; first, a place is "listed," then it's "classified." I'm not sure what the difference is, but there are a lot less places which are classified than are listed. The castle was "listed" in 1862, and finally "classified" in 1993... whatever those terms really mean.

It was a fun drive up the hill; they're not as particular about guardrails here as they are in the states. Once we got toward the top, we found the "parking area." The road splits in half as you approach the castle, it's a one way road around the right side of the castle. The castle effectively sits in the middle of a loop, where you just park on the side of the road. As such, when you pass a spot, you're taking a bit of a gamble that you won't encounter a closer spot. We ended up parking about 400 yards down from the top.

Dear reader, I lost that gamble. I put it all on black, and it came up red. Very red. We must have passed 20 closer spots as we trudged up the hill. At every single spot, one of the two of us would pipe up with "Oh, here's one - why didn't you park here instead?" or "Ooh - I should go back down and pull the car up here!" Every single available spot. Red.

You know what? We've toured lots of castles over here. Y'all have read about us touring lots of castles over here. Honestly, because it wasn't my summer home, I don't have a lot to say about this particular castle that made it stand out (that I haven't already shared about it). Here's all you really need to know about it:

• It was a cool old castle on a hill.
• We took a bunch of pictures, see?

After we toured the castle, we stopped at the restaurant (which we'd walked past on the way in) so the boss could have her glass of wine, outside, somewhere pretty. The inside of the restaurant was pretty full, but no one was sitting at the tables outside... and we soon figured out why. We got two glasses of wine and two pretzels, and took them onto the patio.

The restaurant has evidently arranged for a pretty aggressive bouncer. There was a "great tit" (a Parus major - a little black and yellow bird) whom our presence evidently offended. He was quite bold, literally trying to take pieces of pretzel out of the basket, and in one case, trying to seal a piece right out of my hand. Cute little bird, but his behavior left something to be desired - just a little bit antisocial.

Afterward, we drove back down the hill and headed south on the surface level road. We wanted to check out a couple of the little towns, so we stopped at Ribeauville and Riquewihr, wandering around taking pictures.

After our little bit of exploring, we headed back down to Mulhouse (where the hotel was), and headed straight to Costco. When I go back to the states, I'm able to shop at the Costco in Knoxville, but the boss only gets to go when she goes to Knoxville, or occasionally when she visits her cousin in DC. You only get 2 cards with a membership, so the girl child has one, and I have the other. Honestly, I think that's the only reason I made the cut for this trip - I have the Costco membership!

We didn't actually buy much stuff, but we enjoyed wandering around there. We stopped at the grocery store on the way back to the hotel - it wouldn't be open the following day.

That night, we had dinner at the other restaurant, a steak house called "Hippopotamus." The boss had a burger - pretty sure it was beef though, and not hippo - and I had wings, in case you were wondering. 

The next day, we drove back to Frankfurt... and I procrastinated on writing this blog entry for so long, our next trip crept up on us... so keep an eye on this space for another entry over the next couple of days!

An uneventful trip to The Hague, but first....

Just like last time, I tracked this trip in FindPenguins, feel free to check that site/app out for updates during our trips.

So the boss had to go to The Hague for work, so we looked around online for a place to spend the weekend. One of the quirky things about Germany is that just about the whole country is closed down on Sundays, so I was looking at medium(ish) sized cities in The Netherlands. While zooming in on Eindhoven, there was a museum right outside of town that caught my eye...

I've mentioned before that the family art critic decided when we moved over here that she needed a favorite artist. She figured that if we were going to be going into all of these museums, might as well pick a local(ish) artist to get interested in. She chose van Gogh. Also, she takes the the vast majority of the pictures when we travel... I'm not going to apologize that most of the pics are related to van Gogh - that's what most of this trip was about, after all! 

Take a look at the screenshot below and see if you can tell what caught my attention:

If you look really carefully in the top right corner of the picture, you'll see something that I (correctly) predicted would make my supervisor really happy. If it doesn't immediately jump right out at you, just be patient, we'll get there in a couple of paragraphs. 

The nearest Marriott property was in a town about 20-30 minutes to the north called... I'm gonna carefully put the city name on its own line, so there's no confusion about the correct spelling, punctuation, or my current blood alcohol content:

's-Hertogenbosch 

Additionally, just to prove I'm not making all of this up:

We booked a room there and headed out on Friday afternoon. We arrived in the early evening to find our hotel in a bit of (what felt at the time like) an industrial area. Let me take a quick break and talk about the Dutch language...

I know that *all* languages were "made up" at some point - I mean, the language was actually created, right? Dutch, though... it sounds like it's still being made up, while they're actually using it. It's enough like German that I can (mis)understand about every third word, but the rest of it honestly sounds like gibberish to me. You'll imagine that I'm pretty excited when I can recognize a Dutch word in the wild, right? Over our trips to (and through) The Netherlands, I've learned that the word "the" in Dutch is "den." When we go to The Hague, in Dutch, it's Den Haag. 

The name of the hotel was (and I am not making this up!): The Den. Yes, they really named the hotel "The The." This was a source of endless amusement for me over the weekend, but we all know that I can be a bit simple at times.

We checked into the hotel and inquired about parking. Turns out, we had to park in a garage a couple of blocks away, the parking lot for the local shopping area. Walking back to the hotel, we passed by several restaurants and a grocery store.

We couldn't figure out what we wanted for dinner, so we decided to head to the grocery store and pick up sandwiches... on the way there, we encountered a place called "Happy Italy" and decided to try it out (instead of cold sandwiches in the room). That turned out to be a pretty good decision - the place was good enough that we went back a couple of days later (but we'll cover that when we get there). There was a dessert on the menu called "Italian Mess," which we were intrigued by, but neither of us really wanted dessert that night.

The next morning we had breakfast in the hotel, then headed down to Eindhoven to the Van Gogh Village Museum. 

Brabant (alternatively called North Brabant or Dutch Brabant) is a province within the Netherlands - vaguely analogous to a state in the United States - which dates back to the late 1100s and was its own state in the Holy Roman Empire. After the Eighty Years War in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the predominantly Catholic population of Brabant were systematically and officially discriminated against by the Protestant government of the Netherlands, leading to a very different atmosphere in this part of the Netherlands, and I bring this up for a very specific reason: van Gogh. It always circles back to van Gogh, doesn't it?

Van Gogh was born in a town in Brabant, and throughout a lot of his artwork, you can still see sights from the area. As such, places around Brabant (such as the village of Nuenen) where he spent a lot of time really lean into their connection with him. Nuenen is where the van Gogh Village Museum is located, right across the street from a house his parents lived in, and next door to where one of his girlfriends lived (if you can believe it). I'm being told (while I'm reading this to my supervisor) that her name was Margo. Do with that information what you'd like. I had to learn it, so now you've have to learn it too, because I share like that.

The museum was filled with mostly artifacts from the time he lived in the area, both items which belonged to him, and "representative" items from around the same time. A few pieces of art were included too (of course), but the most famous ones are obviously on display elsewhere.

One of his more famous works, The Potato Eaters, was painted while he lived in Nuenen, and is representative of the village, as well as the general clothing styles of the time:

The Potato Eaters was based on one of the neighboring families, and van Gogh considered it his most successful painting, saying "What I think about my own work is that the painting of the peasants eating potatoes that I did in Nuenen is after all the best thing I did".

The cottage where the de Groot family (the subjects of the painting) lived is supposedly somewhere in the area, but if you want more real information about it, you'll have to check with the family art historian.

Needless to say, I finished up in the museum earlier than the boss did, so I waited patiently in the cafe until she'd had her fill. Turns out, she hadn't really had her fill. There was a walking tour of the village that afternoon that she was interested in - the ladies who worked at the museum made a special call to make sure that a tour guide who spoke English would be giving the tour.

But first, lunch!

...and now that's brought up a sensitive subject that's near and dear to my heart. I have to share some personal information to put parts of this trip into context, so please bear with me (this story is going somewhere, I promise!).

When I was just a young pup, my mom and I lived for a few years with an older couple who functioned as surrogates for us: parents for her, grandparents for me. My "grandmother" had an adult brother who had Down Syndrome who lived with us as well, and some of my most formative years were spent sharing a bedroom with him - almost like brothers.

As a result, I have always had a very soft spot in my heart for (specifically) those with Down's. All of the people with Down's that I've ever met have been the most caring, genuine individuals I've ever had the pleasure of meeting, and I particularly appreciate places who employ them, allowing them to shine and flourish in their own way, while giving them responsibilities which are suitable for them.

Before we left for the Netherlands, the resident TV critic was watching a food show called "Somebody Feed Phil." I like food (and food tourism) shows, but there's just something about Phil that I find annoying, and I haven't been able to get into this particular show. The episode that she (the boss) was watching, Phil was in (among other places) Gouda, and he went to a restaurant in Gouda called.... and no, I'm not making this up... Brownies & downieS. Apologies for the weird capitalization - that's their choice, not mine.

It's a cafe that employs folks with Down Syndrome, and teaches them whatever tasks they're interested in learning, enriching their lives and helping them contribute however they're willing/able to.

It's settled. We're going there.

A bit of research first though. Huh. Turns out, it's a pretty successful business, with around 60 locations, all over the Netherlands! What's this? There are multiple locations in Eindhoven? There's one in 's-Hertogenbosch too? Well, sign me up.

So, we went to one of the locations in Eindhoven for a quick lunch, and it was exactly what I expected. A wonderful idea behind a wonderful cafe. Atmosphere was good, service was good, food was good... when I went up to the counter to pay, I struck up a conversation with the guy in charge, and told him how we discovered him, and a little about my back story. Turns out, the guy I was talking with was one of the founders, and two of his four children have special needs. I'll put more info in the next paragraph, so you can skip it if we're getting too far in the weeds.

The government of the Netherlands has significant social support systems. Companies who employ those with special needs receive subsidies, but unfortunately the wage rules regarding those with special needs are much more relaxed than the normal rules. Unfortunately, too many unscrupulous companies take advantage of them, getting cheap labor out of the deal, while not having to worry about providing these workers (with special needs) any sort of enrichment. The founder of the company didn't want his kids to end up in those kinds of situations, so he founded this restaurant chain.

I highly recommend visiting one of their locations if you ever find yourselves in the Netherlands. Here's a link to their web site, so you can learn more if you'd like. 

The weather was a little drizzly that afternoon, so I wasn't jealous of the boss's walking tour... yeah, that's why I didn't go. I just didn't want to walk around in the rain... let's go with that.

I had initially been planning on going to a nearby museum for Operation Market Garden, but I just wasn't feeling it that afternoon. Honestly, you're probably lucky. If I had gone to that museum, you'd be waist deep in information about World War II and the Allied push toward the Rhine River. Instead, I just parked in a nearby lot and waited for my intrepid explorer to complete her tour.

Turns out, she was the only person on the tour. Maybe it's just me, but if it's just you and the guide that's not a tour. That's a conversation. She saw bunches of places associated with van Gogh's time in Nuenen, as evidenced by these pics:

Good old Vince, wandering through a park he probably wandered through a hundred times before (according to the tourist brochures)

Supposedly, the subject of a famous painting...

...that you can evidently recreate in a selfie.

I think this was (one of) the church(es) that he lived in.
If you really wanna know, ask the boss, she'll know more....
but *I'm* the one writing the blog, not her.

Something something van Gogh... like just about every other building in town

Another few steps, another site for another painting.
They *do* love their van Gogh here.

A sculpture of The Potato Eaters, just in case you'd forgotten that...
it was painted here...
inside a cottage here...
of a family who lived here.

I haven't been specifically told about it, but I'm betting that the church in the background has something to do with van Gogh as well.

Afterward, we wanted to explore Eindhoven a little bit more, so we went back downtown and had dinner in a local food hall. A little bit of wandering, then back to the hotel for the night.

As an aside, while driving around Eindhoven, we passed by the same sculpture three different times. It's called "Flying Pins," and it's quite eye catching. It's 8.5 meters tall (about 28 Freedom Units), and it's basically half a bowling ball surrounded by bright yellow bowling pins that are in the process of being knocked down. According to Atlas Obscura, "the municipality claims that the Flying Pins represent the combination of working and living in a city full of innovation." Sure. That's not what I got from the sculpture, but we already know I'm not the family art critic.

Next day was devoted to touring 's-Hertogenbosch. Quick note about the name of the city. That's its correct name, but we found out that it's more commonly known as "Den Bosch"..... you remember earlier we were talking about the Dutch language, and one of the only words I can truly recognize? Den? So, turns out that they call the city "The Bosch." Look at us - we're learning together!

The art museum in The Bosch had some van Gogh stuff on display (because they're in Brabant - of course they did)... so the family art historian got to indulge her van Gogh fascination for a while longer, then we wandered around the town stimulating the local economy. After a bit of wandering, we stopped at the Brownies & downieS location in the downtown area for a quick lunch. Didn't have dessert there though, because...

Turns out, The Bosch is known for something called "Bossche Bollen" (with an alternate spelling having only a single 'S' - also "Bosche Balls" or any other combination of the two words in English or Dutch or some combination of the two languages). It's a choux pastry filled with whipped cream and dipped (or alternatively just covered) with a chocolate glaze. 

Pic from Wikipedia

In Germany, we have these pastries called Snowballs (or schneeballen) which are (basically) scraps of pie dough formed into a patchwork ball and deep fried, then dusted with powdered sugar. I haven't tried one - I'm sure they're delicious, they just don't look very appetizing to me. 

Pic also from Wikipedia

Reading the description of Bossche Balls, I was expecting something similar. In reality though, they are nothing alike. Snowballs look like they're quite... rugged. Bossche Balls though are quite light and fluffy. The chocolate on top had a little bit of a weird texture, but again - we weren't sure what we were getting ourselves into. The filling seems to be just lightly flavored Cool Whip - I'm sure it's homemade, using some famous recipe that's been passed down for hundreds of years, but I'm just trying to describe it realistically. We shared one, then continued our exploration of the downtown area.

We eventually ran out of places to wander to, and headed back to the hotel. We ended up going back to Happy Italy (again) for dinner, and we shared the Italian Mess for dessert. Halfway decent, but we agreed that it could use more of the lemon curd.

I guess we were at the restaurant too late in the evening for our first meal, but for our second meal there were a lot more kids there, and interestingly enough most of them didn't have shoes on (which we found a bit odd). Turns out, there's a ball pit in a back corner of the restaurant - I didn't see any arcade area, but the closest comparison we could come up with was to Chuck E Cheese. Kids would run back to their table and have a couple of bites of food, then disappear again for a while. Yeah, so turns out, we (the "empty nesters" with kids in their 20s) unknowingly went to a Dutch version of Chuck E Cheese for dinner twice in three days simply because the food was pretty good. Not sure that would ever happen in the States. If that happened in the States, I'm pretty sure that'd be enough to get us put on a list.

We took our time checking out the next morning; we were less than 2 hours away from the hotel in The Hague, and check-in wasn't until 3. Instead of heading straight there, we continued what's turned into a "tradition" for us... when we get close to The Hague, we find a nearby beach town (the Netherlands borders the North Sea) and have a light meal and drinks on the beach. This is a tradition that the family travel agent instituted (you all know how much I love the beach and finding sand everywhere, right?), but I play along. 

Quick aside... this is a fruit beer from Belgium that we fell in love with on our trip to Bruges. In Belgium, it was served in a regular beer glass. We had it twice in the Netherlands, and both times it was served over ice with mint and a slice of lemon. Those crazy Dutch folks!

Nothing much happened while we were at The Hague, so I'm actually gonna skip it. Only 2 things of note to share: 

1. One of the first trips we made to The Hague, we discovered tapas, and now we try new tapas restaurants wherever in Europe we find them. The original one we went to in The Hague remains our favorite one though. This trip, we ate dinner there two different nights. 
2. On a sadder note, another early trip to The Hague, we found their "Food Hall," with 10-12 different restaurants sharing a common building (and seating area). We like those kind of places because we can each pick what we want, and not have to settle for a kind of food we're not really in the mood for. Well, sadly enough, the one at The Hague has shut down. That just means that we'll have to find other places we like as much... or we'll just have to go back to the tapas place multiple times in one week. I've seen us do it!

That's all for now, thanks for sticking with it for this long. Go have a snack, you've earned it!

For some strange reason... Hannover?

Gonna try something a little different for this blog post. We've got a trip to a new place planned for this coming weekend, but I figured I'd write up a little about it beforehand, and we'll can all compare the "before" with the "after" (as a fun little group activity) once we're back.

First of all... is it "Hanover" or "Hannover"? Yes. Turns out, it's spelled both ways. The English spelling has one N, the German spelling has 2 Ns. I can't keep straight in my head which one is "correct," so basically you can pick whichever one you prefer (at that particular moment) and switch them out whenever you'd like - that's what everyone else seems to do.

Looking at what there is to do in Han(n)over... doesn't really seem like there's much there. The site that I check for Free Walking Tours, tours of Han(n)over aren't even a thing. If you check out Trip Advisor, the number one tourist attraction in the city is City Hall.

Evidently, there's something weird about the elevator in there - it goes up inside the dome of the building, and it's the only elevator ever made that tilts as it goes up. Every other elevator that climbs up a curved shaft (inside the Gateway Arch, for example) is mounted inside a "cage" of sorts which allows it to remain level as it climbs (and descends). This elevator evidently runs directly inside the curved rails, and the floor of the elevator noticeably tilts as it climbs. 

That's the number one tourist attraction in this city - the elevator inside City Hall.

So, the question at the forefront of everyone's mind... why are we going to Han(n)over anyway?

Well, the boss has a long weekend coming up, and we wanted to gȯ someplace we haven't been before, with the northern side of the country being our last quadrant that we haven't visited. Also, the travel agent was able to get a good deal on the hotel there, and it's got a lounge, so we get free breakfast, and don't have to eat at restaurants every night! So... we got pretty reasonably priced train and bus tickets (train there, bus back), and I'll write more once we're back!