We made our way to France driving from Holland via Belgium and then through Luxembourg. We’ve spent our first few days in France enjoying the Alsace region. Located close enough to Germany that it takes on a combination of the two cultures, sometimes it’s hard to remember where we are. Here, the menu’s have foie gras and sauerkraut side by side, and, seemingly, equally loved. The region is the stuff of fairy tales. Every village seems even brighter and lovelier than the next. Half timbered houses on cobblestone streets are draped in flowers and nestled in the base of green valleys. From the villages, grape vines cover the hillsides up to where ancient castles top the peaks. It’s a beautiful place to walk and take in the scenery. We’ve spent many hours walking through villages, vineyards, and hiking steep rocky crags to get to medieval castle ruins. The boys love exploring the old castle ruins and would spent hours climbing, jumping and playing, if we let them.
There are more than 400 pairs of storks living in Alsace today. That is a huge number, considering that, because of environmental changes, in the 1980’s there were only 2 pairs left. Alsace has set up breeding and research centers, which account for the increase in their population here. They spend their summers in Europe and winter in Africa living beside the elephants and lions. Storks are not only known for bringing babies, they are also believed to bring luck. It is a much beloved bird here and we spotted many nests on the tops of church steeples and rooftops. We were very excited when we spotted this family on top of the church steeple. We’ve read the book The Wheel On The School by Meindert De Jong which is a cute story about village school children in Holland trying to get storks to come back to their village to nest. That’s probably what made it so exciting for us!
There are paths for walking everywhere, which makes it easy... they just aren’t very well marked, which makes it interesting. On one our our walks through the vineyards, we found a pear tree with the most beautiful and sweet pears hanging high in it’s branches. The boys decided to conquer the challenge of picking pears for our snack. The challenge... wading through rotten pears, that had fallen on the ground and were now covered in yellow jackets. We’ll they succeeded and climbed the tree and managed to get a few pears for us to enjoy.
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