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Ah oui, la France... Comment j’aime la terre des vins et du fromage savoureux…

My parents always go to the Alsace and Vosges mountains on vacation, and bring home stories of mountains, waterfalls and vineyards. I just had to see it for myself.So this year, I promised my parents I would visit them for a couple of days while they are on vacation. My cousin Kevin decided to tag along, and so we left on Thursday morning. My satellite navigation system said that the quickest route (577 kilometer) there was via German, but since the gasoline is cheap in Luxembourg, we decided to drive via Belgium and Luxembourg.

My parents were camping in a town called Luttenbach, which is a small and serene village. Apparently it is so small that my navigation system didn’t know about it. It was still early when I programmed my navigation system, and of course… Murphy never sleeps. So… my navigation system did exactly what it had to do and drove us perfectly towards the wondrous village of Lutterbach. By the time we found out that we were in the wrong village (Lutterbach instead of Luttenbach), we were approximately 120 km too far south. If you’ve ever driven in the mountains, you know that even a small 30 km trip can take up to an hour and a half, because of all the twists and turns you have to take… So our small 120 km “detour” caused us to arrive on the camping site at 20:00, instead of the planned 17:00. The route home was much quicker, hehe.

The full photo album of the trip can be found in the “photos” section. We drove there on Thursday, and returned home on Monday. A small report:

Friday.

Due to the small configuration mistake with the navigation system, we missed the route that my parents said would be super to drive: the Col de la Slucht. This route is famous amongst bicyclists, but according my parents there’s plenty to see for car drivers as well. Since we had to buy some food for the night anyway, we decided to drive over the Col the la Slucht to a town called Gérardmer. My parents weren’t bullshitting, and the views were indeed spectacular. We also visited two small waterfalls, but due to the rainy weather we didn’t spend much time there. After eating a very nice pizza in a local restaurant we drove back to the camping.

Grocery time! Luttenbach is a small hamlet on the outskirts of a village called Munster, and on Saturdays there’s market in Munster. Munster has two very distinct features: Munster cheese and storks. Storks? You mean the baby bombers? Yes, those storks! The village is crammed with them, and they’re pretty much everywhere. One small note on Munster cheese, by the way… keep your nose closed! My god that stuff smells bad.

After the market we visited a supermarket with 54! cash registers. That supermarket was ridiculously big. The dairy section alone was about the size of an average supermarket. After a shopping spree, my mom wanted to show us something cool. We drove a little while and suddenly found ourselves facing a miniature (well… it’s still 10 meters or so) version of the Statue of Liberty. We drove a bit further to see some vineyards and had an ice cream at a castle on a mountainside.

The highest mountain in the region is the Grand Ballon at 1423,7m. On the top are a small weather station and a restaurant with a nice view across the valley. Unfortunately for us, it was a bit cloudy, and we couldn’t see very far. A cool thing that we did see was the water vapor rising up from the woods.

A little south of the Grand Ballon is another mountain called Hartmannswillerkopf, where a large cemetery and monument for the 1st World War form a very impressive sight. Unfortunately, the museum was closed. The place was crawling with small reptiles, which were very quick and agile. It took me quite some time and effort to get some decent pictures of them.

All in all, it was a fantastic trip, and I will definitely return there some time to check out more of the region.