Kaysersberg castle.	Shorty on the road into Riquewihr	Riquewihr

The transition from mountains to plains was abrupt, and at the bottom of the mountain we found ourselves on a dusty road through the vineyards into Riquewihr.

Riquewihr is, by all appearances, an affluent bedroom community with a tourist town in the middle of it.  Completely walled, it’s bigger than Turckheim, and has a bridge crossing what’s left of its moat at the west end of town.  At late morning on a clear Sunday, there were a number of tourists milling about.  A bakery gave free samples of warm orange flavored macaroons.  I soon went back and bought half a dozen.

We couldn’t stay here long, though.  On our original, shamelessly stolen, itinerary, our next stop was to have been the mountain town of Thannenkirch.  I hadn’t been able to get reservations for us there, and since we were already almost half a day behind, we had little hope of reaching Thannenkirch today, anyway.  We sat outside the city walls, eating a lunch of bread and cheese that smelled like dirty socks while I studied the map.  Finally, I proposed walking to the town of Ostheim.  The map showed a train station there (at least, at the time, that’s what I understood arrêt, which I understood as “stop”, to mean), and we could catch a train from there to Selestat.  We could stay there for the night, and since Selestat wasn’t far from Chatenois, the town where we were to stay the next day, we would find ourselves back on schedule.  And anyway, even if we missed the last train of the day (as we had no idea of the train schedule, particularly on Sundays), Ostheim looked big enough that we could find a place to stay the night there.  The downside of this plan was that we would have to get off the established hiking paths and just walk along the road.

We struck out on the two-lane highway heading into Riquewihr.  It didn’t take us long to get to the town of Beblenheim, another medieval village, but one that apparently had missed out on Riquewihr’s economic prosperity.  In the square in front of the church, a few teenage boys were gathered, popping wheelies on their bikes.  As we passed, an older boy turned up on a motorcycle.  A gaggle of teenage girls soon appeared, and he took them each in turn on breakneck rides through Beblenheim’s streets, passing us periodically as we made our way out of town.  A rooster crowed.

Outside Beblenheim, we were walking through dry fields flat as North Dakota.  We could see the rail line a couple miles distant.  I cursed every train that passed, worried that it would be the last one of the day.  They all seemed to be passing Ostheim, whose water tower we could see by now, but I assumed they were all express trains.

We trudged into Ostheim’s arret by going under a tunnel and up a set of stairs.  The station looked abandoned.  A train schedule was nowhere to be seen.  Metal signs reading Ostheim were rusted.  Still, there was reason for hope.  A man stood on the platform, facing away from the track into some bushes.  It looked like he was urinating, but he stood there for several minutes.

Hay bales	Shorty on the discouraging road into Ribeauvillé	19th century water tower in Selestat

Finally, at Shorty’s instigation, I went to ask him what time the train was.  I walked to him warily, trying to see just what he was doing in the bushes.  Turns out he wasn’t urinating.  He was staring at the chickens in the back yard of a house adjacent to the station.

“Excuse me sir,” I said.  “Do you know what time the train leaves?”

“What time?  5:30,” he said.  “Yes, I think it’s 5:30.  Or maybe the station is closed.  Is there a timetable?”

He starting pacing around, looking.  We passed Shorty.  I told Shorty what he’d said so far, shrugged, and followed him.

“No, no, there isn’t a timetable,” he said.  “The station is closed.”

“Thanks,” I said.  The man shrugged, went back to the bushes, and resumed looking at the chickens.

“Do you ever feel like you’re in an Ingmar Bergman movie?” Shorty asked.

“I was going to say David Lynch, but yeah.”

Ostheim looked terrible.  There was nowhere for us to stay here tonight.  I pulled out the map, surmised that arret refers to out-of-service platforms while gare refers to actual in-service stations, and found that the nearest rail station was in Ribeauville, about 3 miles distant.

We had no choice.  We slung our backpacks back on, trudged back through the tunnel, and turned to the north on a dirt road passing through fields next to high-tension power lines.  My feet and shoulders hurt badly.  At last we crossed a stream and saw children playing behind a farmhouse next to the road we’d been waiting to see.  Increasing the pace, we reached the train station.  It was open, and the next train left in fifteen minutes.

Twenty-two minutes and a surly conductor later, we were in Selestat.  Shorty sat in the train station and sent me off in search of a hotel.  Selestat looked like a largish city.  I limped in the direction that looked like the best hope of getting me to the city center.  The first hotel I saw was the Hotel Vallante, which had a room for 60-odd euros, which I took without hesitation.

I limped back to the train station and got Shorty.  We checked in and found a clean and comfortable room, though one oddly decorated in coral and teal with a large, bright yellow desk lamp.

Hungry, we left and wandered into the city, looking for dinner.  This we found at a restaurant called 7eme Arte.  Though short on atmosphere, the food was very good—Shorty had duck and I had steak.

Back at the hotel, I took a razor blade to the blisters on my feet.  Shorty watched French TV—we didn’t get any English channels here.  I broke out the macaroons; we each had one and went to bed.

Onward!