Travelfood

The border areas of Germany and France offer beautiful sceneries especially by the rivers Rhine, Mosel and Neckar. You can use weeks for driving along the rivers viewing all the small towns, castles and wineries. The area is especially beautiful in autumn, when the wine harvest culminates in different festivals and when the night chills have coloured the forest leaves red and yellow. At the same trip you can also do a small detour to tiny, beautiful Luxembourg, right in the middle of the Ardennes mountains.

The French part of the Elsass area is called Alsace, and its kitchen is world famous. Already the half-timbered houses of Colmar and Strasbourg are evidence of the close-by Germany. If you drive along Mosel River to Germany, you might be mostly impressed by small-towns Cochem and Bernkastel. If you drive along Rhine valley through Saarland, the most famous towns are Saarbrücken, Rüdesheim, Mainz and further north Cologne with its huge cathedral. University city Heidelberg is especially beautiful.

If you want to visit a huge castle overlooking a whole town, I was impressed by Marburg which is a bit on a sidetrack. Of the wineries St Goarshausen is the one I remember best. The good side of this area and these countries is that everything works. When my car broke down on the Autobahn, I stopped by one of the several aid phones by the motorway and called for Adac, the German road service, which took me to the closest car repairer for free.

They smoke and air-dry meat a lot in the region and onions are cultivated. During the autumn harvest time, they make zwiebelkuchen, which are small onion pies with smoked ham. The national dish of Luxembourg is called judd mat gaardeboune, which is meat with garden beans. In practice that means sausage or ham with beans in a casserole. Similar variations are found in Germany and the French cassoulet is perhaps the most famous version.

Europe, food, Germany, Luxembourg, travel, travel experiences