Colmar

Colmar is south of Strasbourg and we went there for somewhere to go. The old town was something of a picture as you can see below.
Colmar was preparing for Christmas. Market stalls and rides were being set up everywhere, but since this was November still, it was all yet to open.
Pictures (and sometimes captions) speak for themselves.

The huge church - The patterned roof is typical

The river runs noisily below the street level

Decorated stalls are everywhere

The Little Venice area

A ski and sled log cabin - appears to be created new for the season.

The self-named "Romantic" restaurant

Setting up. This ride is a reindeer monorail....

Old and beautiful house and roof

This last shot was when it was almost dark, but it had to be tried. It really was this colour.
We will be back.

Travel Home

Or not to travel home - if the rail strikers had their way!
Clare chose Tuesday 8th November to go back to England by rail. Strike day as it happened and her train was cancelled. It looked to be running when we checked Monday 7th, but on the day it did not run.
But we did!
First we checked trains from Reims. They had to arrive in Paris in time for Clare's Eurostar connection. There was one, in 50 minutes. But Reims is 80 minutes away by car.
The train went via Épernay, 70 minutes away, but from Épernay the train departed 30 minutes later. We jumped in the car. We drove, without speeding, toward Épernay, keeping an eye on the destination time on the GPS. The time was good, so when the GPS took us via a short-cut we kept to it.
We parked with 10 minutes to spare- time to get the ticket printed. I queued (in case the machine refused the reference; it was the wrong station after all!), and Clare accessed the automatic ticket machine. It worked, the machine printed the ticket so we abandoned the queue for the singe assistant on duty, and found the platform.
And so Clare caught her train to Paris to arrive at Gare de l'Est with 25 minutes to walk the 10 minutes to Gare du Nord. Would she make it? She arrived in Paris at about the same time we arrived back by car. This time the GPS decided to take us the slow country route. Glad it didn't do that earlier! Since she was probably busy before the train left I sent a text only after the departure time.

A photo from Clare's visit - nothing to do with the dash for home!

Later I received the reply. "Took the wrong turn out of the station and missed my train. Because of the strike, they put me on the next one at no extra charge." Just an hour later back in England, that's all.
The fall back plan to go the next day saw 50% of trains also cancelled, so better this way I think.