TriumphAnt

How, I almost sobbed to myself, had it come to this? As I sat in the driver’s seat of the Peugeot, parked, I listened to Leslie tell me through the side passenger window what the helpful gate attendants to whom she had just spoken had given her by way of directions. To our immediate right was the Gare de l’Est, one of several major railroad stations in Paris. Big enough to contain a quartet of Zeppelins and enough people to make a profitable gate return for a Rolling Stones concert, the Gare itself was not our destination – a rental car return office somewhere inside it (possibly), under it (perhaps), nearby (maybe), or for all I knew, hovering a hundred feet straight up in the air, was. To our immediate left were three solidly-packed lanes of traffic flowing around the station in a clockwise direction. And beyond them lay three lanes travelling in the opposite direction. What Leslie was telling me was that the workers said we needed to be in those lanes going the other way, and had told her simply, “Just turn around.”

Having already steered through Leslie’s near-flawless navigation across over 200 km of country roads and a good 25 km of progressively more frenetic Parisian traffic and interchanges that carried us from the French capital’s suburbs to close to its core, suddenly I felt a bit like those guys in “The Mummy II” who had just battled several hundred god-dog soldiers (I guess that would be the Army of Pharaoh Palindrome), only to straighten up, exhausted, and notice that the distant desert dunes were turning black with several thousand more of them approaching on the run.

“Turn around????” I asked. Croaked, actually. “Turn around,” she repeated for about the fourth time, with infinite patience and not a little sympathy.

How, I asked myself again, had it come to this?

Well... since you ask.

(The following actually covers two days’ drive touring, with our last overnight at the Chateau in between. We weren’t crazy enough to log this much mileage in just one day.)

When we pulled out of the Chateau, the only reason we knew that the sun was struggling upwards into the sky was because we had seen the ball dimly outlined in the early morning fog. (But if you recall my previous post, it resulted in a couple of beautiful photo-ops on the Chateau grounds. Here’s another.)


We were headed for a town named Selestat, located at one end of the Alsace wine route. The drive to Selestat turned out to be rather slow for two reasons – the aforementioned fog for 80 or so of the 100 km we had to travel to get there, and the fact that the route carried us along a tight, winding path far up into the Vosges Mountains and then carried us back down along much the same kind of road on their other side. As we crested the range, we found ourselves above the fog line and were rewarded with several wonderful views of autumn-coloured tree-covered steep slopes.
(For the record, the Vosges are bigger than Hamilton’s “mountain”, but they’re not the Alps. A typical peak rises 500 to 1000 m, and they’re all well within the altitudes at which trees thrive.)

We arrived in Selestat while it was still morning, albeit closing in quickly on noon and, after a delightful café au lait and croissant, headed back up one of the nearby peaks to an astonishing work of would-be mediaeval reconstruction called the Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg.

The history of the property is remarkably colourful. It was first built for the same reason many such castles were built around the 12th century – a hilltop fortification that was intended to be impregnable. Unfortunately, the castle’s builders hadn’t reckoned on that most formidable of foes that occasionally are employed even today – a coalition – and in the mid-1400s, just such a union of rival cities attacked it and burned it to the ground. A rebuilding effort was successful only for a time and the castle was once more razed by Swedish troops after they laid siege to it for almost two months in the early 1600s during the Thirty Years War, one of some 2,000 castles they destroyed in the name of spreading the love and joy of Lutheranism by smashing the trappings of the Holy Roman Empire into the ground.

The castle pretty much existed only as ruins for almost 300 years until some well-intended Selastatians, no doubt rubbing their hands together with anticipated-development glee, came up with what they thought was the brilliant idea of giving it as a present to Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1899. Alsace had only recently been absorbed into the German Empire following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 when it was annexed by the victorious Prussians. The Kaiser accepted the gift, apparently assuming that taking ownership of the castle would help strengthen what he thought to be the (ahem) natural bond between the Alsatians and Hohenzollern Germany.

He had also been floating the idea about for some time of finding a site where he could re-create his vision of the grand old days when Teutonic Knights roamed the land and life was good and chivalry was the order of the day. The Kaiser, in other words, was out to mythologize nothing less than a Prussian version of Camelot. And Haut-Kœnigsbourg (literally, the “High City of the King”) would be its name.

(As students of history have come to know, it was exactly these sorts of cross-Channel jealousies and family one-upsmanships among the various Royal Houses of Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that eventually erupted into World War I – “You have a dreadnought; well we have two dreadnoughts. What do you think of that?” “You have a colony in South Africa; well, we have a colony in Central Africa. Hah!” “You have an Archduke Franz Ferdinand... well... uh, apparently, we don’t. Well then, neither will you!” And the rest is history.)

Haut-Kœnigsbourg today is a beautiful, massive, perfectly-sited, hundred-year old vision of one man’s take on how people lived in the 1400s. It’s now French again, because Alsace-Lorraine was ceded back to that country as part of the reparations claimed from Germany in the Treaty of Versailles that followed World War I – a treaty signed, ironically, five years to the day after the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.

All of that history is simply to lay down the background for these next few photos. Although they show a wonderful castle in the sky that, on a clear sunny day, commands a view of thousands of surrounding square miles – not to mention a view of Leslie, too – just be advised that it is not what it appears to be.






From Haut-Kœnigsbourg we descended (because “down” is pretty much the only direction you can go from there) to the Alsace wine route. Because it was Fall, even the vine leaves below the castle were showing off their Autumn colours, painting yet another wonderful Impressionistic work across the landscape.
Several kilometres farther along the route, and after passing dozens of various-sized wineries, we stopped at another little town, once again simply because our guide book informed us it was picturesque. Riquewihr (pronounced RICK-veer) was everything the guide book said it was. Alsace is a happy blend of things German and French, an amalgam that is reflected in Riquewihr’s architecture, its restaurant menus and its store windows festooned with little signs proclaiming “Deutsch hier gesprochen” and “We speak English” alike.


We had a wonderful lunch at a place called the Dime. During our ordering, I probably should have noticed that our waiter’s eyebrows shot up when I asked for a side of sauerkraut in addition to the schnitzel cordon bleu plate I had ordered. It already came with spaetzle, those irresistible little dumplings that look like elbow macaroni and, to my mind anyway, are as essential to German food as rice is to Asian. Sure enough, what was plunked down in front of me turned out to be two meal-sized platters of food because the sauerkraut, which arrived on a plate about half the size of a Hummer’s hubcap, was itself accompanied by a generous serving of boiled potatoes.

For the second time in our dining experience so far in France, we also observed the apparent freedom with which pets, in this case a very friendly dog, are permitted to roam about the premises – not simply in the foyer, but from table to table throughout the dining area. Given that bread is a finger food in France, I refrained from giving him a friendly scratch behind the ears because I still wanted to savour another slice from the delicious baguette basket without an accompanying “essence de chien”. Leslie did ask the dog if he would consider joining us later for the return trip back to Canada, but he confessed that his passport had expired. (Just what was in that House Gewürztraminer?)

Funny thing about House Gewürztraminer in an Alsace restaurant – it’s utterly fantastic and was served to us en carafe at the perfect temperature – chilled, but not to the point of vapourizing its flavour and aromas. We left Riquewihr with a trio of bottles from the Ernest Preiss winery – a Gewürztraminer, a Riesling, and a Muscat.

Our final drive of this trip (at least in the rental car) was a scenic run from Alsace into Paris. We travelled by way of Epernay and yet another little-known local wine region – Picardie and les Caves de Champagne. I saw a recent television documentary about this same region and was flabbergasted to discover that, despite its relatively small geographic dimensions of roughly 32,000 hectares, Champagne is home to no fewer than 300 production houses and 15,000 (!) separate vineyards, from great signature names like Moet et Chandon, Veuve Cliquot and les Caves de Dom Perignon to pick your “any” of dozens of lesser-known houses and thousands of lesser-known (but not necessarily “lesser”) varietals.

Oh, if you’ve ever wondered how to tell the difference between a wine grape and a champagne grape, well wonder no more, because here is the answer. This is what wine vines look like.


And in the second photo are champagne vines.


Baby Duck: maintaining our policy to provide education with our entertainment.

(OK... So the real trick is to find a nearby sign that identifies just what the heck it is growing in the field beyond.)


Once again I got a queasy feeling when, as we also crossed both the Meuse and Marne Rivers, as I had when we crossed the Somme I thought again of the many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of soldiers who battled across this same terrain in WWI in the fierce advance-and-retreat fighting that eventually battered both sides into to a four-year-long trench warfare standstill on what history would forever call The Western Front.

We had one more rural highlight to experience before finally immersing ourselves in the urban bustle of France’s capital. As we rolled along, at one point we both realized about the same time that it was feeling a bit like time to pull over for perhaps a bite of lunch (this was the day after our monster Bavarian feed in Riquewihr). For some peculiar synergistic reason, we both confessed a craving for fries, no doubt sharing the sentiment that perhaps some comfort food was in order after so many purely local meals. Then as we whirled around a corner, we both burst out laughing at the same time – there on the edge of France’s renowned Champagne district was a large – and I am not making this up – McCain factory. It was effervescing the smell of freshly French-fried potatoes across a wide swath of the French countryside and it was that aroma that had insinuated itself into our heads, triggering shared hunger pangs at exactly the same time.

Fortunately, a few minutes later we came to Dormans, a town that is home to a wonderful brasserie called The Luxembourg. Not only did they provide a delicious sausage and fries platter, they also served an unbelievably good draft-brewed product of the Belgian Abbaye Affligem, a red fruit wheat beer that seemed to blend hints of both raspberry and wild cherry with its light wheat base.

The half pint of Affligem wheat beer was a fortunate bit of resolve-steeling for what was to come next.

As we approached to within 25 km of Paris, the road landscape changed from quietly rural to ever more frenetic urban. Leslie kept up with a tremendous stream of navigation, while I kept up with a tremendous stream of oral invective about the hopeless inconsistency in the way the French identify their streets as you approach each new intersection. Whether driven by some madcap sense of whimsy, or simply a regret at having missed any local parallels to the Spanish Inquisition and wishing now to instil a home-grown version of the same torture on tourists who dare to venture into their environs on rented wheels, the French seem to think that each new city intersection is best appreciated as a creative puzzle to solve.

Let’s see – is the streetname’s sign on a post on the sidewalk, or is it a diminutive, hand-lettered hundred-year old plaque affixed to one of the buildings? And which one? (We would soon find that this was often difficult to discover even when we were walking!) For even more fun, will it be painted a colour that blends in with the building, or a high contrast colour you can not only spot, but actually read as you drive through the intersection when the light changes?

Finally, we reached the massive rail terminus where we had been told to return the car – the Gare de l’Est. And after driving around fully half its perimeter without a single visible hint of where to return the rental car, we pulled over to solicit some directional help from a crew of workers at what looked like a gateway into the Gare.

Which brings me full circle to the first paragraph of today’s entry, and the discovery that we were parked on the wrong side of three solidly flowing streams of traffic – ACROSS which we now had to turn to enter the stream flowing the other way, a manoeuvre we were assured would return us to the gate labelled simply “P”, where used rental cars apparently go to die.

What followed was a combination of blind luck, probably sheer stupidity and not a little fingers-crossed courage with which I suspect I will be able to regale lunch companions for months, if not years to come.

Pulling the steering wheel around a full couple of circles, I turned the rental car literally 90 degrees to the traffic flow and inched forward. The first vehicle I encountered was an oncoming car that actually slowed enough that I continued forward to the next lane, whose position was about a half second away from filling in with a city bus. Like Nelson crossing the T at Trafalgar, I inched ahead, rolled partly into the path of the oncoming bus -- and it stopped! Darting ahead, I realized that the bus almost completely obscured what lay on its other side, but in for a penny, in for a pound, and so I pushed the nose of the rental into the next lane.

I was rewarded with the simultaneous screech of brakes and a blaring horn as the car that had been moving to pass the stopped bus found its lane suddenly blocked by the front half of our rental car. At this point, I could see the car’s driver and could see, too, that he was winding up for a good-sized Gallic explosion. Miming frantically, I bashed myself on the chest, made a sweeping upside-down “U” motion with my arm, pointed to the lanes just beyond flowing in the opposite direction, then pressed my hands together in a gesture of prayer.

And he laughed! And with humour, not vindictiveness. Then, with the gesture of one of the “Price Is Right” showgirls unveiling a new prize package, he mimed a huge “Go right ahead” sweep of his own arm and waved me across.

The gods of traffic, I gratefully assume, by this time had obviously decided either that I’d suffered enough, or perhaps had gotten away with as much as was reasonably allowed any tourist, because a quick glance to my right revealed the oncoming lanes momentarily were completely empty, held up by a wonderfully timed signal light a few yards farther along to the right. Hauling the wheel once more tightly to the left, I swung into the nearest lane and suddenly we were pointed the direction in which we needed to be heading.

And think of it... I had only aged ten years in as many seconds! A small price to pay. (I have since been advised that the Paris Bureau de Circulation has already issued the necessary work order to have a plaque commemorating our unbelievable feat readied for installation at the point on the round-the-Gare road where we made the crossing.)

But we weren’t done yet. I referred moments ago to the gods of traffic. They obviously were working at cross purposes with the Gare’s security guards because, when we got back to the “P” entrance to where we had been told the rental car return lot was located, there was a solid barricade of closed gates. But at least there was a guard. I rolled down my window, leaned out and yelled (because he and the gate were on the left, across those same three lanes I had just crossed to get back to this point): “Retourne d’un auto... Location... Europcar?”

And at the very moment the oncoming traffic stopped at a second perfectly-placed red light, he moved the gate aside! Now I felt like an Ali Baba who has suddenly discovered the French for “Open Sesame!”. As we entered the garage, we were not surprised to see not the slightest visual indication anywhere telling us where EuropCar returns were to go. But once again, we spotted help in the form of a trio of construction workers patching a concrete pillar and were told by them “Cinquième étage en bas – all da way to da boddum”. At least they helpfully pointed to a descent ramp we now saw in one corner of the garage.

Navigating that proved also to be an exercise in back-and-forthing. The corner to enter the “down” ramp at each level of our descent was so sharp and narrow it appeared to have been designed for bicycles rather than cars, requiring my getting halfway through the turn, straightening the wheel, backing up half a car length, then finishing the turn so as not to collect a crisscross of Gare de l’Est concrete gouges scraped into the driver’s side of the car.

At level 5, our arrival at the “boddum” was confirmed by the absence of any further “down” ramps – finally! We saw one lowly EuropCar sign hanging from the ceiling and discovered that the same traffic gods who’d blessed our dramatic U-turn decided to re-enter the picture one last time. They created for us what was, I swear, the absolute last parking space left in the entire underground garage, and by the time I shut the engine off, we had no more than 12 inches of space on either side. I didn’t care. If I had to, I’d exit by the side sliding door. I was not moving this car ever again.

As we lifted the rear hatch to unload our bags, the hatch door cleared a concrete pillar (as had I, apparently) by not a micron more than the breadth of a human hair. Wishing a silent “Good luck” to whomsoever next had the misfortune to be responsible for getting this vehicle out of the garage, I pressed the “Lock all doors” button on the keychain and gave the car an affectionate thank you pat. When we got the bill a few weeks later, we saw we’d logged over 2600 km (with the single mishap of my lightly backing into a parked car in Arras one day, fortunately leaving not a mark on either car, but prompting an “Oh-la-la!” from our host Franck, who was in the passenger seat at the time to navigate me around the block to the Corne d’Or’s parking lot).

After searching throughout much of the station itself, we finally found the EuropCar office – it turned out to be located on a different underground level of the Gare. We handed over our keys, merely nodded at the gasp of appreciation from the clerk when we told her we’d actually managed to place the car in an honest-to-goodness parking space instead of simply abandoning it in the traffic lanes (as we noted not a few other people had done), and decided to wait right there for the 30 minutes still left until the driver with whom we had pre-arranged a ride to our Parisian home in the St Germain neighbourhood of the Seine’s fabled Rive Gauche (Left Bank) for the next week was scheduled to show up.

And for the first time in over an hour, I exhaled.

...

Oh... AITOI (As I Think Of It)

I overlooked a service point in my previous description of our lavish meal in the Chateau Anonénil – something that I’d heard about, but this was my first-ever experience with a practice that I have since seen described as “musty”, if not downright sexist. When Leslie and I received our menus, we noticed they were identical, except that hers had no prices listed for anything on the entire menu. Only mine did.

I had a theory about that and, when we returned home, I looked about the internet for verification of my guess that it was actually intended as a courtesy for a couple so that the woman, assumed to be the guest, would be able to feel free to order whatever she wished, without any consideration of cost even entering into her choices. It also allowed the man, assumed to be the host, to blanch when he did the quick mental arithmetic after hearing what his “guest” ordered, then to quickly embark upon such stimulating table talk as, “Did you read that article last week about the amount of calories that are in lobster with drawn butter?” He could then gaze meaningfully at her hips before asking, “Are you sure you want to order that? What about consommé and a couple more of the complimentary breadsticks? They’re amazingly fresh, you know!”

Here’s what the New York Times “Diner’s Journal” blog had to say in April 2006 about the ever-more-rarely-encountered practice. For extra fun, browse the comment stream that follows the column – obviously the practice has both its supporters (“How charming”) and its detractors (“particularly insulting to my intelligence”). And then, as well, there’s the “Are you sure you don’t just want a couple extra breadsticks?” vindication: “My parents were treating us to dinner and my boyfriend was practically choking when I ordered my meal. As he had prices, and I did not, I was unaware that I had ordered a $75 salad.”

Next: Even when you’re a passenger, Parisian traffic is scary. Settling into Paris tourism, and discovering that the only thing separating me and master Parisian photographer Eugene Atget turns out to be about 108 years. (While the only thing separating Leslie and Hitler turns out to be about 68 years!)