Dead Body on the track!
Okay, so that’s how our travel day from Brussels to Strasbourg started out. This was meant to be a long travel day, but it became even longer. The train was several minutes late getting started and that’s actually pretty unusual. But then we started hearing these PA announcements in French (and some English) about a delay because of a dead body on the tracks and that the train would have to take a different route. Or, that’s the best we could tell. So that was a first. Our 5 ½ hour train ride became an 8 hour ride and that was without a food car on the train. (That’s about equivalent of our flight from Newark to Europe.) We did finally crawl into the Strasbourg station ready to get off that train and walk.
The good news is, we didn’t have to walk nearly as long as our first days. Our hotel was literally three minutes from the station.
We checked in and twenty minutes later walked to the city center which is dominated by the impressive Cathedrale Notre-Dame. We had hoped to get to see inside, but the church was closing as we were arriving. Just as well as we were starving so found the hotel-recommended restaurant where everyone had some sort of Alsacien specialty. I’m not exactly sure what it was, but the boys polished off their selections without any problems. We had some ice cream as a dessert treat at a stand next door to the restaurant.
We then walked around the area around the Cathedrale and then walked around and through an area nearby called Petite France. It’s an area of cobbled streets lined with medieval and Renaissance timbered houses. Little France got its name in the 16th century when sufferers of syphilis were isolated here to keep them well away from the “worthier” citizens.