May 24, 2025

Weather Mostly sunny but chilly, 40’s when we left and high 50’s when we returned.

Early morning walk-about

We had some difficulty going through the locks this morning and arrived at our docking port, Kehl, Germany, 2 hours late. Viking juggled some tours and at 9:30 we were off on our first tour inside France.  The city of Strasburg is big, some 500,00 people in the metro area. And so, there were many modern areas to go through before we reached the old city.  The river L’ill passes through the town and the townspeople from a long time ago decided to channel the river more than natural and so we have a city with many canals.  Certainly not like Amsterdam or Venice, but there are a lot of canals, nevertheless.

The River L’ill

Off the bus our tour guide, Gianni started walking. Shirley and Paul were in Group A while Bob, Loren and Pam were in group C. (Ann may have caught Paul’s cold and took the morning to rest.) We had different guides and it was fun to compare them.  Consensus was there are good and better guides.

Gianni hawking pastry

Group C Listening attentively

We wound around the old city seeing the different architectures. You see, Strasburg is a city that has been French or German many times over the years. Even the Notre Dame Cathedral showed signs of the different architects.

Typical building

Gianni told us a few clues, like if it is symmetrical, it is French, if it has sloped roof with gables, it is German. The old town is quite large and we walked along the cobbled streets looking into many shops.

A yarn store

Our farthest destination was La Petite France, a very old part of town. Old but very picturesque. The buildings had character and the tourists loved it!

La Petite Frances

We learned a lot about the city.  It is expensive relative to the average salary (some thousand Euros for a 2-bedroom apartment a month in town). The Stork is everywhere. I think the soccer futbal team’s mascot is a stork. Eventually we came to Gutenberg Square.  The erstwhile printer lived here many years.

In Gutenberg Square

As the walking tour ended we had one more stop and that was to the crown jewel of the city, the cathedral of Notre Dame. We approached it from a street crowded with tourists (and tourist shops).

Approaching Notre Dame

The crowd was not difficult to navigate as we neared this very massive cathedral. It is BIG! It is free to enter and 8 Euros to walk to the top of the roof (hard pass here). It was hard to take a picture because it was so big, and so hard to see the different stages of completions as first French then German Architects threw away the plans of their predecessors and made their own, only to have them thrown away when the regime changed. This happened at least 4 times during construction

The front of Notre Dame

The west side of Notre Dame

After receiving instructions on what to do with our free time and how to catch the shuttle back to the ship, we said adieu to Gianni. And started off walking down the varied streets filled with cool buildings and shops.

Cool Building

We found a shop that satisfied Anders’ and Hazel’s Europe present and happened upon an open air market stall that had the perfect fancy thing for Jenny. After that we found a boulangerie and sat outside with some local pastry and watched the people go by.

Eating pastries

Soon it was time to meet our shuttle which we did after a 15-minute walk from Gutenberg Square.  Back on the boat it was lunch and nap.