A slow shortcut to Saint-Louis
The pretty things are off the beaten track, but they’re never forgotten
“Oh, my, that’s so prutty,” came a voice over my right shoulder. It had been prefaced by an audible, sharp intake of breath. It was the kind of utterance that comes when the eyes behold something of exquisite, unexpected beauty. It’s involuntary and it’s the verbal equivalent of getting down on one’s knees and thanking God.
It was the summer of 1984. The accent was Texan and the voice belonged to Mrs Earline Fry. And it wafted over my right shoulder because I was sitting two feet, her two feet, below her in the crew seat of a touring coach. I was her group’s travel guide, and Earline was on her first ever trip outside the United States. That’s where she had entered the world 92 years previously, at a time when the century still started with an 18.
The view that had invoked this expression of wonderment was not some awe-inspiring panorama of the River Rhine, the mechanical majesty of the Eiffel Tower or the baronial pile of some ancient English castle. No, it was a French country road in the southern Jura. And what had embellished it to the point of evoking her appreciation was window-boxes brim-full of hanging geraniums.
The route from Dijon to Lucerne was very familiar to me, and early on in my guiding career, a colleague had given me the tip for the run over to Switzerland, of slowing to observe Vauban’s magnificent fortress at Belfort and then exiting the motorway to snuck down the D419 via Bessoncourt, Foussemagne, cross the Rhône-Rhine Canal (three times) to Dannemarie, and proceed on to where France starts to look like Switzerland, both landscape-wise and name-wise: Altkirch, Schwoben, Ranspach-le-bas and Hésingue before finally piercing Switzerland at Saint-Louis. It saves you doing a dog-leg on the A36/A35 motorways around Mulhouse and, even if it’s not a fast road, boy, as Earline aptly put it, it is so prutty.
Image: the D419 west of Ranspach-le-Bas (Apple Map app).
In the distance, the Jura mountains lure you on to Switzerland, and meanwhile the road alternates between sharp bends and straight rods of tarmac. Eventually, we get to cross into la Suisse at a quiet little country douane, just a few minutes away from the great motorway border post at Basel. Meet me in Saint-Louis, Louis.
Image: French-Swiss border crossing at Saint-Louis (Apple Map app).
Not every tour guide would do the D419 through Altkirch and, while it was more work for the drivers, I never once had one who denied the road was far prettier than the motorway around Mulhouse.
Earline would probably have been out of this world before I quit my job in tourism. But, on the Paris-Lucerne run, we would do lunch in Dijon or Beaune, and I always thereafter took the shortcut across the D419, precisely because of Earline. Because she’d so loved the run down that road. Because she’d been entranced, and, I felt, others might like to be entranced, as she was, on her only trip ever to Europe, and her only trip ever outside the US. At 92 years of age.
She was one of the best tourists I ever guided, one of the most appreciative, and thankful. Because she knew she had this one chance to see everything, and I knew I had this one chance to show it to her.
Image: Mrs Earline Fry of Texas, USA. By the author.
Talking of ancient English castles
If you’re anywhere down the Graaf Jansdijk in Blankenberge today, you may need to edge around a police cordon owing to the likely tumbling on your head of a five-ton piece of concrete. It is apparently clinging on for dear life to a building in that street, of which it was intended, at least initially, to be a permanent part.
In Ghent, whilst residents of a tower block complex were recently reauthorised to tread upon their balconies, no doubt in order to profit from the balmy weather we’ve been having, they were immediately told not to take the emergency stairways since they’re suffering ... an emergency. Like, they’re collapsing under people’s feet. And one such incident did cause a slight peaking of two residents’ blood pressure of late.
With school buildings the length and breadth of the United Kingdom closed owing to the seemingly time-factored aspect of concrete rot, can it now be that concrete isn’t all it’s knocked up to be? Concrete is, I recall from a school outing in my early youth, what Portchester Castle is made of, it having first been constructed by the Romans, who developed a form of concrete that simply got harder and more durable, the more time went by.
Just one more thing that the Romans did for us, but that we have long since forgotten about. Middle Ages, probably.
Image: Portchester Castle, Hampshire. (By Matthew Folley from UK - Portchester Castle, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4363629.)