Back in Lyon, we decided to walk to the train station to get our rental car, stopping at the new Paul Bocuse memorial food palace for lunch. The lunch was terrific! 
Because of a problem with the Rental Car, we didn’t leave Lyon until about five. Then it was south on the Toll Road and then west, running alongside the Mediterranean Sea for a while, past the walled city of Carcassonne in the twilight, to Toulouse where we stopped because of darkness. 
All posts by Steve Stern
In Lyon, Moving South
We are in Lyon, after taking the TGV from Strasbourg, after driving from Schifferstadt. We will rent a car here and drive southwest to Cousin Marion’s home near Auch, 50 miles or so, west of Toulouse. The French countryside was beautiful, sliding past at 150kph and Lyon deserves much more than an overnight stop. 
We saw Sebastian Vettel get pole at the Hockenheimring. It was great.
To be clear, Vettel getting pole wasn’t great but the experience of seeing the Qualifying for the Grand Prix of Germany was great. Poor Hamilton went over a high curb and damaged his gearbox. He will start fourteenth.
This is Wednesday so this must be Strasbourg
Strasbourg is overwhelming on first seeing it but it was also somewhat familiar, another French-German City on the Rhine. We spent almost the whole time in the old city pretty much between the Cathedral and the Lock area, which, I have a feeling, is like spending the whole time on a trip to San Francisco at Fisherman’s Wharf. Although we did get across the river to the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, we probably didn’t get the most well-balanced picture of the city. The old town part of Strasbourg was packed. It was way, way, more packed than anyplace I have been except Disneyland. I think that is because, heretofore, I have only been to Europe in October or early December and more than half of the packees are students. Hugh groups of students – mostly high school students? it is hard for me to tell any more – and what appeared to be college students bumming around Europe. It does give the place a sort of sexy air, even as it clogs up the place, but we are fellow tourists, so it is hard to complain. 
The Cathedral is a Gothic improbability. It is made of sandstone without any reinforcing steel, everything just balances, resting on whatever is below. 
For me, the river through and around the city was the biggest surprise. Here are a couple of snapshots;
Another pleasant surprise was the Museum. I had been disappointed in the Centre Pompidou-Metz but I thought this building was great. It was designed by Adrien Fainsilber from Paris and the central space soars to Cathedral heights. We had gone to the museum in our quest to find a meal without liverwurst and, we had read, it has a good view of the old town. The view was OK and the lunch was terrific. 
At the end of the day, it is hard not to love this place. It is both very old and very contemporary…and very charming. 
In and around Schifferstadt
This I’m typing this in Strasbourg which looks to be fantastical; we just got here and I want to out and play and I am getting sooo behind on this blog and I want to catch up, so this will have less commentary than I had hoped.
We are staying in Schifferstadt, a small suburban town in Rhineland-Palatinate. It has a population of about 20,000 and is so clean and orderly, so un-rundown, that I thought it must be a new suburb sprinkled with Disneyland-like buildings (to add character, perhaps). Maybe something like Walnut Creek or San Mateo in California with faux mission-style buildings, then I realized that the City Hall – shown above – was built in 1558.
1558! 62 years before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, 397 years before the Plymouth City Hall was built (and I’ll bet the Schifferstadt City Hall is in better shape). Our hotel, shown below, was probably built about the same time – although the rooms are very modern – and the town is a mix of very old, semi-old and contemporary. 
The closest big draw is Speyer that has a magnificent Romanesque Cathedral. It is, by far, the tallest Romanesque building I have ever seen and its simplicity is almost zen-like. Under the church are various tombs including a king’s tombs, called Kaisergräber, a name that Michele and I found particularly charming. 
We visited the Maulbronn Monastery which was a Roman Catholic Cistercian Abbey but, when the local ruler became a Protestant, he nationalized the seminary and church. It is now liberal Lutheran (whatever that means). The original monks were sent from Bourgogne, France in 1156 and built the Romanesque Church but, by the end of the century, they changed the attached construction to a Gothic style (one of the first in Germany). The conversations about the change must have been interesting: “This is a very nice church but sort of old-fashioned. Back home, in Bourgogne, we are now building in the Gothic style, takes less stone and looks better.” “But we have 50 years invested in this style.” “Yeah, sure, if you want to be old-fashioned….”. The crucifix, by the way, is carved from one piece of stone (both Jesus and the cross are one piece). 
We finished our last day in the old city of Besigheim which was founded in 1459.
