Off the beaten path in France: Strasbourg

We had lunch in Strasbourg last summer on the way to Switzerland, but the stop was too short for a blog post. This time, we have more photos and stories to tell. Depending on which roads you take from Kaiserslautern, it’s a bit over 2 hours.

We climbed the cathedral tower first off. FYI, there is a public restroom underground to the right of the cathedral as you face the main doors. We’d recommend a boat tour of the river around Strasbourg, with multi-lingual recorded narration.

We’d highly recommend the hot chocolate and pastries in Strasbourg…we did not have as much luck with lunch during either visit. Please be aware that if you order “boeuf”, it will not necessarily be cooked beef. I discovered tartare by accident, and am no worse for the experience, but just in case the thought of paper-thin sliced raw beef is not your idea of fun, this is a head’s up. Both restaurants included meat-heavy menus, with a few vegetarian choices. The second lunch educated me as well, yielding larger-than-golf-ball-sized hunks of liverwurst. I actually like liverwurst sandwiches, but not large balls of the stuff!

Our favorite moment was difficult to photograph, because we were sitting in a café enjoying stupendous “chocolat chaud”, when a black cat strolled by wearing a harness on a leash!!!!

There are a number of parking garages near the old-town neighborhood of “Petite France”. Both times we tried to leave Strasbourg, we had a tough time with sudden lane changes and poor signage, despite a GPS, so be alert.