Day 17: Rains, trains, and walking shoes

We woke up in Riquewihr to a grey, drizzly sky, but with the promise of clearing skies throughout the morning, so we took our time with breakfast and packing. Just we were getting ready to leave, the drizzle seemed to intensify a little, so we got out the extra rain gear and spent the next 10 minutes battening down the hatches. And as so often seems to happen, when we finally did get going, the rain had basically stopped.

But we did still get a bit of moisture over the next 45 minutes or so as we steered toward Colmar about 15 kilometres away. Riquewihr being somewhat off the Route des vignobles/Eurovelo 5, we had to cycle some somewhat busy roads to get back on track, which was not particularly pleasant in the wet weather. And in fact, EV5 doesn’t go though Colmar at all, so we had to do some zigzagging along other, less-well-marked routes to get into the city. Not the easiest place to get into by bike, which is maybe why EV5 doesn’t go there.

A wet road but clearing skies

We had hoped to arrive early enough to at least wander around the centre for an hour before taking the train to Munster, where we had booked a hotel room for the night, but because we had to consult our various navigation devices so often, it took us a solid hour and three-quarters to get to the train station, about 25 minutes before the train we wanted to take left, so all we saw of Colmar was the train station.

We hopped on the 12:10 train to Metzeral, getting of at Munster. After checking into the hotel and locking up our bikes, we walked into town and poked around a bit before finding the trailhead of a hike up into the hills north of the town. We had initially thought to do just a short hike, but the day had turned so beautiful that we decided to fork off on a longer one, which took us up and then back down south of the hotel (and Munster), where there was a supermarket conveniently located for us to pick up provisions for a picnic supper.

Munster

We got back to the hotel after walking a total of 4 hours. That, plus the 20 kilometres of biking this morning made Peter and Sonia pretty tired. After a short rest, we walked down to road to a little park to eat our dinner, observed intently by the resident ducks and a single lonely, plaintif goose trying to fit in.