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Avis' Genealogy reseach tour through Alsace-Lorraine - 3 |
Day Five - Abreschviller to Mulhouse
The bill from Familie Baillet was incredibly cheap, ¤336.52 (about £210), for three nights & five meals plus various beers & wine. We had to get ourselves to Rixheim today but, being a Sunday, there was no hurry, so we went back over the Col du Donon by the other road (going through St. Quirin) & down the main road South-West to St. Marie les Mines & over the last pass of the French holiday to Ribeauville, an extraordinarily pretty Alsacien village, where we stopped for coffee, a stroll & photos. The next stop was Riquewihr, equally pretty, where we had dinner-at-lunch in the Hotel St. Nicholas for £10 each, pate starter, chicken & blueberry cake to die for (or of). We went on to Mulhouse, avoiding Colmar because of the time & on to Rixheim, which we had difficulty in finding at first, because it is tucked away from the Basel road. When we got there, no hotels in evidence, so we searched the adjacent villages & Riedisheim. On failing, we went back to Mulhouse & serendipitally found the Hotel des Musée nearly opposite the Textile museum we wished to visit anyway. The room was big, elegant & cheap: ¤57 + ¤1.60 tourist tax for both, B&B. It was now raining & we walked nearly into the centre of the town for a snack at the Café O'Bryan (I kid you not), a goat's cheese salad for Avis & a Salad Queen Victoria (!) for me for ¤23.10, out in the open but under their brolly. Back at the hotel, we wrote our cards.
Ribeauville |
Ribeauville upper village & castle |
Riquewihr side street |
Riquewihr main street |
Riquewihr lower village |
Rixheim Hotel de Ville |
Rixheim |
Rixheim Churchyard |
The breakfast was a bit minimal. We went to the Hotel de Ville at Rixheim (found with difficulty, even though we saw it in passing yesterday), a magnificent building, vintage Boney III probably. Ushered into the Archive under the roof (as was the Sarreboug one), we met Benoit Meyer, who had obviously turned his hobby into a job. He soon extracted all of Avis' ancestors from the files. We repaired to the Café Nico, the village pub, for coffee. It was crowded with workman types, lunching on wine & chattering away in both French & German & the landlady was another Madame Baillet type. We asked after Saltzmanns & her husband was wheeled out to tell us about Jean, whom he rang & who invited us up, a very-unFrench thing to do but it turned out Jean, one of the few remaining Saltzmanns & about 70, spoke German. We had little to say to each other except to register that we had met & we went off back to Mulhouse for a sandwich in a Vietnamese café & look round the Textile Printing Museum, which was very fine. In one of the (fortunately multi-lingual) description cards, it mentioned a School for Textiles & Practical Geometry that was free in the 19thC. We wondered if Joseph went there but could not find it. It is part of Mulhouse University now & I will have to look it up on the Internet. Snooze & then we had beers (very good - Swiss Feldschlosschen at ¤5.40) in the old centre of Mulhouse, which is as attractive as the better known town centres like Strasbourg. Then, back to Rixheim for dinner in the posh Restaurant aux Raisins, which was not outrageously expensive (¤50.10 with puddings & water).
Contact: Ken Baldry at 17 Gerrard Road, Islington, London N1 8AY +44(0)20 7359 6294 or e-mail him URL: http://www.art-science.com/Tourism/France/Alsace/a3.html Last revised 20/3/2003 © 2002-2003 Ken Baldry. All rights reserved.