August 3rd, 2007: Our ultimate destination for the first week of this trip is Burgundy - about 450 miles from Amsterdam. Deciding to drive through Germany (and a fine decision it was too - the opportunity to show a pair of Porsches a clean pair of heels during one 160MPH blast along an unrestricted autobahn providing all the justification I need) we turned off the autobahn at Koblenz to drive down the Rhine Gorge.
Short on time (thanks DFDS again) we had no time to stop at any of the castles or even any of the towns proper but it proved an enjoyable enough break from the pell-mell pace of the motorways.
Arriving in Strasbourg, finding our hotel - in the Petite France old part of town - proved too difficult for us, our GPS and even the locals we asked, all of whom expressed their dismay and told us what we had already discovered - the pedestrianisation of the area has blocked all the roads you would normally choose to take to get to the hotel which we could clearly see.
Eventually, I gave up and walked through the streets to the hotel and asked the bell-hop. The answer it seems is that everybody's GPS maps are wrong - you don't ask for the hotel's published address, you ask for a square somewhere else in town then ignored the warning signs and drive down a canal embankment - et voila!
How very Gallic that it's not the hotel's directions to guests that is wrong but everyone else's GPS maps!
Ho hum ... Strasbourg itself is a delight - and la Petite France in particular. We enjoyed a romantic stroll along l'Ill (that's an L, an apostrophe, an I and two more Ls) and ate in a pretty restaurant on its banks overlooking the light show played out on the old buildings.
1 comment:
Glad you're having fun, now post some piccies!
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