Another long gap between posts, and this will probably be the last one from the road, from the delightful little canal-river-and-hills town of Epinal in French Lorraine.
Close by Alsace, home to Jutta’s paternal grandmother in those border regions that have so often switched ownership over the centuries in the wars between France and Germany.
We’ve been exploring those ancestral links, hiring a car for a day to explore family links to the east, and letting Daisy get her breath back in an Ibis hotel garage ready for the final 6-day push to Hoek of Holland and back home by North Sea ferry.
In time, unexpectedly, for the UK elections, where we’re both looking forward – schadenfreude being an old English word of course, which just doesn’t translate into German – to the Tories getting their richly-deserve come-uppance for, among so many things, having driven us away from Europe with Brexit.
Our route just east of Luxembourg in the next couple of days actually takes us through Schengen, of universal Euro-visa fame to which we of course as Brits do not belong. Yet.
I’ll add a sprinkling of photos below (collective noun for photos? Murder perhaps?), illustrating amongst other things the decay of so many French towns, hollowed out by hypermarkets and population flight to bigger cities.
And also the rampant spread here along all the waterways we’ve been cycling of Japanese knotweed, so hard to eradicate and so violently hostile to native plants – bit like our own human species as a plague on the rest of the living world.
The cycling has been going brilliantly, with both of us enjoying days of up to 150km in a stretch.
One’s nether regions of course take a bit of a battering, but we’re somehow surviving and thriving, though helped it must be said by a largely following wind since Provence, and wonderful(ly flat) French canal- and river-side cycling paths.
Putting our pathetic-to-non-existent cycling infrastructure in the UK to shame, as I might previously have mentioned.
So, photos, including one of a plate of first-timer frogs’ legs, poor things, imported would you believe it from Indonesia, as it’s no longer legal to use native frogs in France except from VERY expensive dedicated frog farms. The things one learns on the road.
