Rest Day

Our last Friday in Ribeauville was declared a day of R & R.
Ted chose to walk up to St Ulrich’s Castle again and indulge his love of photography. There are three crumbling castles close together. They are in the Communal Forest of Ribeauville, so are maintained by the town, and access is unrestricted. One of the castles, Haut Ribeaupierre, is crumbling more than the other two, and has lots of signs in French saying access interdit. If this were in Australia or America there would be ten foot cyclone fence topped with razor wire to keep out the public. But Ted had the perfect excuse – he could not understand the French – so went in anyway and took lots of great shots.
LouAnne and Judith spent the morning catching up on emails and postcards, and in the afternoon went up to the factory shop at the Beauvillee. This factory is famed for its exquisite printed fabrics used in top level interior designing. The fabrics used to be hand-printed and dyed, and modern designs in curtain material sell for around $150 per metre. LouAnne bought a lovely runner that she plans to use as part of her Christmas setting.
I, however, was not as smart as the others. I fancied a walk along some of the footpaths, or sentiers, in the area. In Europe many of these have been linked into long-distance walking paths, or Sentiers de Grande Randonnee, that can stretch for hundreds, or thousands of kilometres through several countries. The GR5 passes through Ribeauville and its castles, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I rose early, and left the house at 6 AM to walk up to the castles. It is still daylight savings time in France, and sunrise isn’t till about 7:45, and I had no torch, so I had to walk up in the dark to the castles. I remembered the route from the earlier climb, so it wasn’t too hard to walk by starlight. I reached the castles by 6:30, and it was too dark to read the sign markers, so I sat in St Ulrichs castle looking down on the fairy lights of Ribeauville and the surrounding wine towns till first light and I could see to continue my walk.
The GR5 crosses the foothills of the Vosges mountains, and I had read in a guidebook the higher up Massif du Taennchel had some of the best walking in Alsace. So I left the GR5, and climbed up to the highpoint of the Vosges mountains in the area. It is only 1000 m above sea level, but has some of the most magnificent walking I have ever done. The soil is quite rich, and rainfall fairly high, so the moist forests have been spared the ravages of the wildfires that have devastated the drier southern parts of Europe. There are beautiful stands of mixed forest with huge oaks, pines, and deciduous trees.
After an exhilarating two hours I dropped back to the GR5 and continued past Haute-Koenigsbourg Castle to a small village Chatenois, then returned to Ribeauvile through non-stop vineyards and post-card villages. The Club Vosgien has marked all the sentiers with metallic markers. Sometimes four or five sentiers loop through each other, so there can be several markers on each corner. Walking back to base I passed a post to which someone had nailed two scallop shells. Litterbugs! I thought. A little further on there was a lovely stone fountain in the middle of a vineyard with a stream of cool water, and a clam shell carved into the stonework. A little further on there was a sentier marker with signs “Ribeauville 7.5 km, St Hippolyte 2.5 km, Campostela 2236 km”. I hadn’t realised that I had walked 14 km along the Campostela de Santiago, or Pilgrims Path that leads from Germany through France to Spain and St James, or Ste Jaques, or St Iagos shrine near Finisterre.
I got back to our cottage near 6 PM. I was pretty tired. I can’t understand why, as I had only walked about 40 km in the day.