This little thing actually is a very small house. I think our guide said 600 square feet, but that might be overstating it. August 2025.
Monday, August 11, brought our first real step into France. (“Real” because technically the airport we landed at on the 8th, the Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg Airport, is in France and we were in France a good 10 minutes after we left the airport, too!) Colmar has the historical distinction of holding no military value when the Allies came bombing in World War II. Therefore an important city from the 800’s and a major trading town in the Holy Roman Empire can still show a visitor many historical and undamaged buildings. Being in the Alsace region, Colmar shifted back and forth between France and Germany after the Roman empire broke up. It’s been in France since the end of WWII. I think if we had known it considers itself to be the capital of Alsatian wines, my wife might have taken a different interest in it.
But it was hot. Really, really hot, about 95 degrees F. Having poorly planned my traveling wardrobe (a recently developing habit), I roasted in a collared shirt over a T-shirt. Our guide Johannes had narrated our Black Forest tour in the morning, and he continued his adroit guiding and droll humor in the afternoon. A small but critical step with a guide I learned later: make sure everyone has crossed the street on the light. He performed admirably, and I’m sure he narrated a good tour, but between the heat and the fact it occurred over a month ago, I remember only one thing distinctly (other than the lack of WWII bombing): it’s the birthplace and home of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor best known for designing Liberty Enlightening The World, known in America simply as The Statue of Liberty. His sculptures appeared in several locations.
In the courtyard of Musée Bartholdi. “Les Grands Soutiens du Monde”. There’s a great deal of symbolism here having to do with the three figures (one hidden) representing Patriotism, Work, and Justice. September 2025.
A different view of Les Grands Soutiens du Monde. September 2025.A “pulled back” shot to display how this statue was situated, and the general ambiance of the Old City. I think this is “Fontaine Schwendi” depicting Lazarus von Schwendi who brought a Tokay grape to Alsace from Hungary. This grape became known as Pinot Gris and thus crucial for development of Alsatian wines. September 2025.
This building feature apparently will be recognized by players of some video game, or perhaps some strange streaming thing. I think it was “video game”. Obviously I have no clue. September 2025.
We wandered around the first of a good handful of cathedrals we would encounter during the trip, but ultimately we had to spend some time in what little shade we could find. Despite being a Monday, it also was August when it seems most of France takes a holiday.
Flying buttresses. I can’t remember if we were allowed inside–I wish we had gone in if the answer is “yes, you were.” Difficult to see are the bullet holes on the façade. Colmar didn’t escape allof the damage from WWII, just the bombing. September 2025.
Market Square, Colmar, France. September 2025.
The Colmar Market Square, stylized. September 2025.
While weeding something moved, just a bit, and I spied this Southern toad. I haven’t seen one around this house since we moved in over 8 years ago, but saw them regularly at our former house on a pond. Pretty lethargic—it’s a nocturnal creature. September 2025.
One month ago today we woke in our own bed after flying in from Belgium the night before. Only now am I catching up to yardwork, which these days consists of staying ahead of the interlopers in our all-natives garden covering the front yard and hacking away at plants in the back before they can seed. Their days are numbered: two weeks from now we hope to start the replanting of the backyard. I question, at times, why we paid so much to plant perennials which should natively grow here but there ya go. A complete and pleasant shock has been seeing the blue mistflowers explode in size and coverage. These beautiful and late-blooming plants had for years volunteered amid the purple coneflowers I’ve showcased many times on this blog. Most of them were taken out to facilitate the new landscaping plan, but the architect of that plan instructed his crew to transplant as many as possible. Given that it was a week into October, he also sprinkled any seed heads he encountered. I think the much better soil helped them out a little bit:
This bank of blue mistflowers looked reasonably modest in size when we left for Europe on August 7, 2025. They’ve now taken over this segment of the yard, overwhelming several plants underneath them. September 2025.Detail from a much larger photo of another bank of the blue mistflowers, showing how small flowers form much larger clusters. This photo is unretouched except for a slight amount of sharpening I added to see the flower petals better. September 2025.
I had to transplant two which ‘volunteered’ at the edge of the walkway to our front door and by doing so, obstructed most of the sidewalk. One withstood the shock and has many buds on it. The other has stood with severely wilted (but green!) leaves for almost four weeks. I keep telling it, “hang in there! You don’t need to bloom! Just live!”
Many tales have been told of this forest. I won’t recount them. Our guide said the rugged hills finally became settled when financial incentives were made (“land”). At the end of our mesmerizing ride in a tour bus on winding mountain roads, we were dumped into a created-for-tourists facsimile Black Forest village where seemingly every tour bus stopped. It didn’t engender itself. After starting on the guided tour to the small church on the grounds, it got a little better.
The Black Forest with creek. The bridge in the background is for passenger rail. A train appeared there minutes before this photo. September 2025.
Things were looking up! Until an “elderly” gentleman (i.e., older than me) fell badly on our way to the St. Oswald’s Chapel on the property. He escaped serious injury, thankfully. We meandered past pastures to the little chapel.
Cows outside the chapel. The slope well represents the entire Black Forest. September 2025.
This guided tour yielded one of the two poor guides we had during the six full days of the cruise. (Embarkation and debarkation days don’t have tours.) I remain greatly disturbed that she noted this chapel still saw use—meaning it’s a sacred space to any Christian—yet encouraged our group to grab a convenient rope to ring the church’s bell, all with a conspiratorial tone of “well we really shouldn’t…” The altar area was fenced and locked, but the rope snaked out under the fencing. (I’m also disturbed I didn’t say anything about how it disturbed me.) Annoyed, I went outside where a different kind of disturbance awaited me. When churches consecrate burial grounds and use them for decades and centuries, they fill up. Practically, this requires them to remove the older bones to make room for the new ones! Because these bones still deserve some respect, churches designate a more convenient place to store them, not worrying about whether they mingle. As I left the chapel and walked toward the sanctuary end of it, I saw a small locked grating which accessed a crawl space under the altar-end of the chapel. “Why would this mesh grating have a lock and a crucifix on it?” I wondered. Surprise!
I believe this would be called an ossuary. Black Forest village chapel, August 2025.A closer look at the ossuary. August 2025.Detail of framed crucifix on the Black Forest village chapel. August 2025.
Other buildings were less impressive and/or photogenic to my eye. A building Goethe once slept in (lived in temporarily?) couldn’t be photographed well due to all the intervening people. I had better luck when I got closer.
Goethe House, Black Forest village. August 2025.
Typifying a traditional village in the Black Forest, this made-for-tourists village leaned in to the central reason for such villages: commerce. A quick in-and-out of the glass shop sufficed. I didn’t want to break anything worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Another building proved more eclectic: a $5000 bicycle with a handmade frame of spruce or fir; steins taller than my wife; cooking utensils of all sorts; knives; Christmas decorations; and fine spirits. We purchased a set of nice flat Christmas decorations which could transport home easily.
Upon our return to the ship for lunch, we discovered a second Viking ship had docked to ours, and now our veranda literally had only four inches between it and the other ship’s veranda. We had known this could happen, and I wonder if a person could book to avoid it. I’ll detail the considerations in case others might be considering a cruise like this:
Our voyage started at Basel and ended (supposedly; more later) at Amsterdam. Thus, we were traveling downstream.
Other than this first docking, our captain turned the ship around every time it docked. Significant rain had fallen in the weeks before our cruise; the Rhine therefore had risen much higher than normal and the current was particularly strong. Pointing the bow into the current meant the ship wouldn’t be knocked around as it would if the basically flat stern were facing the current.
The ship always docked on the east/north side of the river. Even the stop labeled “Strasbourg” in the brochures actually occurred at Kehl, Germany.
Our ship always docked first. Whenever two Viking ships were docked in tandem, the other ship was the one on the outside, furthest from the shore—not ours.
Putting the previous bullets together, our cabin on the port (left) side of the ship meant we always faced the shore with no other ships in our way…except the first stop. We only were docked two (or was it three) times with another ship en tandem meaning we were unlucky the first docking, but lucky all the dockings thereafter, and the ship docked more than once per day sometimes.
Your mileage may vary: we likely would have faced the river all the time if the water flow had been low. If rains haven’t fallen, it’s possible the ship cannot clear the bottom of the river when it comes to certain sections. In those cases one must re-pack all the suitcases, get bused to a different ship, and carry on with the cruise. That would be extremely time-consuming and eat into a leisurely but short and expensive cruise. The same can occur if too much rain has fallen, and the river runs so high the ship cannot clear the bridges it must go under. It’s a crap shoot and a fairly expensive one. We were affected by one of these unplanned events. It should have been planned, and I’m glad it worked out okay. Stay tuned for the end of the cruise.
Good morning, France! (From the German side of the Rhine River). August 2025.
Our first morning aboard the Viking Hlin, I woke early. Apparently three evenings of my patented jet lag adjustment routine (copious amounts of beer, large amounts of food, and moderate exercise) had done the trick. I left my barely awake wife in the stateroom and wandered the early dawn on the top deck. Something about boats and trains indulges the romantic. He wakes happy that someone else has navigated the vessel to a new location while he slept. His sleepy dreams continue when the curtains are drawn: what will I see? Where am I? This occurs in a manner no plane will ever match with its tube-through-time approach to travel.
Turning to the starboard side of the deck, the barely risen sun illuminated a nice cathedral in Breisach, still mostly in shadows.
Breisacher Münster St. Stephan Roman Catholic Church. August 2025.
After realizing our definition of ‘breakfast’ would forever be altered by our onboard experience, we headed out on a bus ride to and through the Black Forest. Its history was narrated capably by our erudite and dryly humorous guide, Johannes, raised in the Black Forest. It reminded me of certain challenging terrains in North America where high foothills exist prior to the Rocky Mountains or the North Cascades (primarily on the lee side of the mountains). Unfortunately, the polarized windows of the bus, and the fact my wife sat in the window seat, made photography impossible.
Our first night on the Viking Hlin, we went through a series of locks en route to Breisach, Germany. Having started with beer prior to our shuttle ride to the Hlin before 3 p.m., by nighttime I could properly be called “loaded.” I had, after all, discovered what selections would be available on board, sampling most. By the time we were going through the locks, I snapped a few photos and collapsed happily into bed. (Our stateroom more than met our standards: a decent-sized bathroom and plenty of storage; very surprising.)
I’m fascinated by doors, windows, and any other portal between Inside and Outside. Part of it’s architectural, but over years I’ve learned I have a near obsession with any door or window which says “different” or “sturdy” or which carry an emotion perhaps symbolic of the wall it pierces. And if our eyes are windows to our soul, what then are a house’s windows?
Our first full day in Basel began with the sumptuous breakfast buffet I’ve come to expect from upscale European hotels. Afterwards we embarked on a walking tour of the historic part of Basel, reached via a short trolley ride from in front of the hotel. Several hours later I had collected six or seven dozen photos. On our second day, we wandered a little park across the street from our hotel, and trolleyed into Basel again where we visited a small but good botanical garden. So many strange doors and windows! (including these…)
Residence, Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.Converted carriage door to residence entry. Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.Clashing architecture. Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.Upscale residence (backs onto the Rhine River). Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.Overlooking the market square, Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.Entrance to a cylindrical chapel in a little park across from our hotel. Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.
Vacationing has meant several things over the years. As a child it meant adventure. Dad would plan a two-week sojourn through the beauty of the American West, plotting the journey for months, and utilizing guidebooks (well, the AAA one) to find both motels and sights to see along the way. By the time I reached “summer job” stage and such vacations no longer were possible, we had seen most of the national parks from the Rockies westward, plus the Grand Canyon, and the tourist hot spots of Southern California (Disneyland, the San Diego Zoo, Knott’s Berry Farm, etc.). We visited San Francisco in 1968 where I saw my great-grandmother on her deathbed and hippies in The Haight. And we always tried to loop through either Seattle or Woodburn, OR, to visit one set of grandparents. Back then, vacationing meant lots of hours in a car reading or imagining things as the countryside went by. It meant rolling with the punches when the road Dad wanted to drive was under construction or the motel he wanted looked better suited to hookers than small children. It mostly meant seeing state after state, park after park, city after city which I had never seen before, and which in my short life presented amazing memories and lessons.
I couldn’t capture that as a younger adult. Vacations at first mostly entailed going home to visit my parents and my friends. I tried a brief camping trip along the Snake and Salmon rivers, but the spectacular views couldn’t make up for my inability to build a fire and thereby have any food to eat. (Or perhaps one could say, the views couldn’t make up for my ineptness as a camper.) A bit later as a newly wedded teacher, summers were for further training, loafing at my in-law’s lake cabin a couple times, and once or twice attempting to emulate my father’s grand tours of the West. I thereby got to see parts of Arizona south of the Grand Canyon for the first time and see some lesser known but equally impressive sights. I explored my own state, Washington, better. The 10 to 11-week length of our summer breaks diluted the compressed wonder of a two-week vacation.
Life changes and a relocation to greater Philadelphia put the kibosh on traditional vacations. Just living there was a new experience. After two years there I discovered a new type of vacation which brings a different kind of satisfaction: the introductory tour. I had met a new love (who married me the next year), and I had entered corporate America where two weeks is the only significant time off you get. I took this woman on a whirlwind nine-day tour of Washington and meet-the-folks. My bride-to-be loved the state and my parents loved her. I repeated the tour in 2017 for a dear couple of friends from North Carolina.
[Disclaimer time: despite the fact I’ve lived in Washington for only four years since I left it back in 1992, I still consider it one of the best places on Earth. My values have to do with variety. In my mind only California comes close to the diversity of climactic zones and has the varied population densities ranging from the Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia wash of people to areas where it’s difficult to find the next house from the one you’re standing beside. Want desert? Check. Alpine? Check. Rainforest? Check. Scablands, Arctic, Temperate forest? Check, check, and check.]
Less than a year after our marriage in 1995, we vacationed to New Mexico for two weeks. We wandered from Albuquerque north, were unimpressed with Santa Fe and hightailed to Taos. In ’95 it had started to build up, but only a little. We stayed at an honest-to-God auto court, and breakfasted at a old West-style cafe on the square. (Revisiting in 2022 saddened me when I saw all of that charm washed away by touristy stuff.) That second week of the vacations, all my tensions dropped away as we shot into southwestern Colorado for two nights before striking to southern NM and the Carlsbad Caverns. Until a couple weeks ago, I held this up as our standard of Best Vacation Ever.
Then we cruised down the Rhine River for eight days on the Viking Hlin, and visited Basel, Switzerland, and Antwerp, Belgium, at the beginning and end of the voyage, respectively. Viking is known for catering to old folks like us (no one under 18 is allowed) and for its all-inclusive approach. We could have been very happy just eating the food, drinking the beer and wine with lunch and dinner, and taking the included tours, but it made sense for us to add two optional tours, take care of gratuities in one tidy little package, and buy the Silver Sipper beverage package so that we could drink beer, wine, and cocktails just about any time we wanted. Given the slant toward the retired and soon-to-be-retired, I must say my initial introduction to the ship gave me a jolt:
“Welcome aboard” kinda takes on a whole new meaning with a tag like that! August 2025.
I’ve nothing against people living the love lives they desire, but still I was thankful there occurred no hot gay sex (that I know of ) on the Hlin. It reinforced my initial reaction after two nights in Basel before boarding, that European cities seem to take a more blasé view about tagging. There seems to be an unwritten rule that it isn’t done on cathedrals and other historical buildings, but other than that…sure, indulge yourself.
As with my Hawaii series [tag: Hawaii] and my Virtual Vacation series [tag: Virtual Vacation] about Michigan and Ohio, this will be a lengthy series of posts recounting how two neophytes who never traveled abroad for pleasure decided to do so in retirement. For now, I’ll end with two photos about our first few hours onboard.
The appearance of swans became commonplace by the end of the cruise. They paddled up for treats just as ducks do in cities throughout the United States. Rhine River just downstream from Basel, SW. August 2025.
On the first night I met one of my new friends: Köstritzer schwarzbier. If you think you don’t like dark beers, give schwarzbier a try. Light-bodied, crisp, but it has a nice roasted taste lacking in traditional lagers. One of the handful of beers offered on board. I wish there had been more! And yes, Europeans are civilized: each beer has its dedicated glass. Viking Hlin , August 2025.
Lap number…I dunno…I lost count. Fawn feeling frolicky, Raleigh, NC. July 2025.
I almost feel embarrassed to post this photo of such poor quality. In my defense, the fawn zipped by so quickly, this represents my best. Much like a swimmer in a lap pool, the fawn ran back and forth, taking about 100 yards for each lap. The crashing of the brush is what grabbed my attention. It had rained for hours the previous night, which caused me to attribute the crashing sound to a falling branch at first. I tried to pan with the fawn, but you can see how difficult that was. Additionally, I shot the photo through the screen of my screened-in porch. Meanwhile, mama calmly moved from yard to yard sampling the greenery.
all the voices in my head 