Euro Day 12

Wednesday May 25 2011

After sub par pain-au-chocolate—we’re becoming bread snobs, we packed up and headed into Beaune (A) to check out market day. We’ve all the other town’s market day so had to try this one even though it was the small market, not the giant Sunday one.

It took us a while to find it in the maze of streets but once we did we got a half kilo of beautiful cherries and some strawberries so it was worth it.
Lizzie made a mess though. Strawberries and cherries all over her dress and since it was her last clean dress Anna had to go do some shopping. (Anna—Yay!) We found an adorable little sun dress that has gotten her many a second look on the rest of our adventures.
 
Couldn’t pass up this lime tart before leaving, though.

It was time to start heading back to Germany and the quickest and most scenic route led us through the Alsace region. We stopped for lunch and playgrounds in Colmar(B). The playground was packed with kids since school is out on Wednesdays but the kids had a great time playing with the other kids. Language really doesn’t seem to get in the way when you’re on a playground.

After playing, two crepes, and candy necklaces for the kids we decided to go investigate the two beautiful church’s whose spires we could see from the park. Both were beautiful though we only went in the free one. The kids aren’t always as reverent as could be wished in cathedrals. This cathedral was one of my favorite. It has one of the more beautiful Christ statues I’ve seen, but maybe I just liked that it was a happy, non crucificed Christ benevolently holding his hands out. Kind of like "The Christus" statue at Temple Square in Utah except for in color.

After checking out the church we found some sandwiches and pretzels for lunch. The Alsatian chicken salad sandwich was the favorite of everyone and even though Dell had ordered it he kindly gave it to Anna and Henry and ate the curry chicken Panini instead.  There were a few accordion players trolling the town center playing the stereotypical French accordion music…which seemed perfectly normal here.
The pretzels turned out to be a little hard but were perfect for feeding the pigeons. Henry and Lizzie were in heaven and Lizzie was especially cute when she crouched down in her super low squat and just hung out there at pigeon level watching the birds. A German couple stopped to watch her for a while. I tell you, it’s a great sun dress we got her.
  Then a last ice cream and back to the car. We’re stuck in some pretty bad traffic now. In all our driving we haven’t seen any accidents, maybe the first one is up ahead.

…Well we made it back to Ramstein (C) and were able to get one of the family rooms. It’s feels like we’re already home with a Chili’s around the corner, prices in dollars and everyone speaking English, although I keep wanting to speak French to people. The room is only available for one night and the Rotator is flying out the day after so we’ll see able where to stay in the morning.