The Alsace is one of our favorite parts of France, right behind Brittany and Normandy. Things don't get more picturesque than the Alsace which looks exactly like the postcards. We had visited the area immediately south of Strasbourg on a previous trip and when we needed to kill a few days before our scheduled weekend in Nuremburg, we flad back across the border to revisit the Alsace which did not disappoint.

We found the B&B where we had stayed on that earlier visit, but they were booked up. However, Monsieur said he would make a phone call and returned to say that he had made the arrangements. I mentioned that we had stayed with them three years ago and he thought about it, then called his wife to come talk to us. She had recently been in the hospital for knee surgery (we compared scars) and was still not doing too well, but she remembered us, primarily because of the large hat I had worn in the blistering heat of that previous summer. I had forgotten all about the hat but it had obviously made an impression.

A car drove up and we followed, with no idea of what we were getting ourselves into but as usual, it turned out wonderfully. The couple had a small room in the basement, ideal in this hot weather, and a large garden with a separate patio which was ours to use. The yard was a riot of flowers--geraniums, petunias, begonias, lobelia, marigolds--mostly in containers which had to be watered by hand on a daily basis. We had breakfast in the garden listening to the birds sing. Our hosts delighted in showing us the four frogs that lived among the lily pads in their little water feature and the tortoise that lived in the little pen under the blue spruce.

The yard was decorated with kitschy wood carvings, old men with pipes carved from a tree trunk, wooden flower containers of a similar design, carved pieces of bark hanging on the shed walls, stc. There was so much of this that I simply had to ask Madame if these were 'a la maison', or made 'in the house'. She smiled and said, of course, and proceeded to bring out photo albums full of pictures of pieces that her husband had executed. They take them to the French equivalent of arts and crafts fairs, primarily near Christmas, and apparently sell a lot of them. He showed me the stock that he had accumulated in one bay of his garage, ready for the selling season. Not bad sideline, I decided. You have a guest room that is probably mostly tax-free and then you sell craft items which are probably similarly hidden from the tax man. No wonder they could afford that nice Mercedes!

The closest large town to our room is Barr, which is a nice mix of old and very old buildings, but the big attraction is Obernai, which is where the first stage of this year's ill-starred Tour de France began. Obernai is truly a post-card village, with a large section of medieval wall and flower-bedecked medieval buildings painted in an assortment of bright colors, typical of this region. Elsewhere in France, buildings are the color of the native stone, but here in the Alsace, they are more likely to be half-timbered and brightly painted. This is a very touristy area and yet we never find it oppressively crowded. One evening we ate in Obernai at an outdoor restaurant on the square and were serenaded by a local band. Sometimes being in a toursty place is OK.

There are many wonderful mountain drives in the area and if you are inclined to hiking, many trails and bicycle paths. We both wished that we had been able to take advantage of these, but we had no trouble entertaining ourselves for a few days. On Sunday we drove in Strasbourg and discovered a beautiful city. Even though it is supposed to have been there for zillions of years, the large buildings on the center of the city looked to my uneducated eye to be relatively recent (18th century and newer) but the long avenues were magnificent. The part of the city around the canals and the cathedral is well worth visiting even for those of us who dislike cities.