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!