July 2nd, 2003

Back in Paris, it’s still warm but tolerable. Our plans are to stay in Paris for a few days then head east towards Alsace-Lorraine and Germany. We have some friends to visit and some business to take care of. I am looking forward to reorganizing my motorcycle bag; it has gotten too heavy and I need to store some of the stuff I have collected along the way. We have to take the paperback books we have already read over to the used bookstore where we will trade them in for credit on some new books. And I am waaay behind on my writing and need a couple of days to catch up!

Mike has a customer who had a problem with a heat-troller and lives near Paris, so we took a swing by his place to take care of his problem and were invited to stay for a few days. Stefan and his wife Jennifer had planned a barbecue for us and another biker, Ted Simon who is on his way home after spending the last two and a half years traveling around the world. Thirty years ago, Ted decided to learn to ride a motorcycle so he could ride around the world from his native England, down through Africa, up through south America, north America, Australia and Asia before coming home again. He wrote two books about his journey and all the adventures he had. A few years ago, he embarked on another epic journey to re-trace his route which took him 2 ½ years this time. He shook his head sadly as he remarked on how difficult the book of his latest journey will be to write, as it will be difficult to put a positive spin on his view of the world as compared to his first trip. He has returned with a saddened and pessimistic view of the world, how things have changed and not changed; poor living conditions going from bad to worse, government corruption, hunger and disease, the widening gulf between rich and poor, the degrading environment, wars. The world was much more naïve thirty years ago and the third world hasn’t learned from the mistakes we have already made...

Stefan and Jennifer turn out to be my age and we have much in common. He is originally from Sweden and is working in an office near Paris. Jennifer is American and we hang out together at their rural home while he goes to work. In the evening, Stefan and Mike putter around working on the bikes and commiserate together on the frustrations of being a foreigner living in France. Stefan is planning a trip home to Sweden in a few weeks with Jennifer on their BMW motorcycle and have invited us to join them. We haven’t been to Sweden yet and this would be a good opportunity but we will keep an eye on the weather map as the time gets closer just to be sure. It tends to rain a lot!

One item of business is a trip to Citibank. My card had expired and I never received a new one, so we had talked to them before we left for Spain and asked for a new one. My new card was waiting for me at the bank but not the PIN code. That has to be ordered and will arrive in one week because apparently it is against French law to have the card and the PIN code at the same bank at the same time. Unfortunately, in France, you can’t pick out your own code and for security reasons it is impossible for the bank personnel to look it up for you. Our three day stay in Paris becomes a week and a half as we decide to wait for it to arrive.

We have discovered a great new hotel to stay in, called Suitehotel, but the catch is that we can only stay there on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. For these three nights, the total price is €139 – that's €46 per night – including a free breakfast of as many croissants and cups of coffee as you want. The room is large, 30 meters squared, and tastefully decorated with wood paneled walls. The bath room has a glass-doored shower and a separate bathtub. The toilet is in its own little room and there are two small closets and shelf space so we can unpack our stuff and spread out a little bit. A tiny microwave, fridge, electric water boiler, another tiny sink, and a table make eating hot food in the room easier. A couch in the corner will make up into an extra bed but during the day has three large soft pillows on it, just perfect for lounging and reading while sipping a cup of tea made from the selection of instant coffee and tea in your room. Woven room dividers pull out from the wall to separate the bed from the desk/table area a person can work while the other sleeps, and the phone is conveniently located by the desk. (there have been quite a few nights when Mike gets up at 2AM to write e-mails or do some research on the computer). And, although the Suitehotel is not in the center of Paris, it is close to the metro and very convenient. Ok, so the problem is that for the other four days of the week the room costs €89 per night, so on Monday we move back to the Etap Hotel where we always used to stay.

The Etap hotel, in contrast, is €46 a night in Paris and can be found in the outskirts of most of the larger towns in France. The room is smaller, with no free breakfast, no closets or shelves, no phone, no microwave, fridge, or water boiler or any of the other extras. It is plain-vanilla in its décor and its main attraction is that it is clean and cheap and has its own shower and toilet, and you always know what you are getting when you book a room in an Etap Hotel because all the rooms are pretty much the same.

We found a nice new café in Paris called Sesame, alongside the canal St. Martin in a quiet neighborhood. Run by a trio of a French man and two American women, the café serves simple food like toasted bread topped with a variety of ingredients, sandwiches, beautiful salads and perhaps the only authentic American style fresh fruit smoothies in all of Paris. But their real passion is coffee. Their espresso is rich and perfumy, and the foam topped lattes are served in a generously large white mug. We asked for a cappuccino the first time we went there. Outside of Italy, we have found that there is a lot of confusion as to the proper way to make a cappuccino. The French usually give you a shot of espresso with milk, and topped with sweet whipped cream and chocolate powder. So, at Sesame, when we both ordered a cappuccino, she responded by asking whether we wanted it wet or dry. Most people, she explained, didn’t know that a “real” cappuccino is “dry” - just a shot of espresso topped with several inches of milk foam. The “wet” version has milk. She made us one to try, so we could be sure to get exactly what we wanted. Definitely not your typical French service.

I have to explain here that typical French coffee tends to be quite bitter, at least to my taste, so when we find someplace like this that has really good coffee, it is really exciting. Finding a coffee to go is not easy; the French tend to be very traditional and always drink their coffee sitting at the restaurant. Coffee lattes are also not very common, although I am beginning to see them occasionally – although there is one French chain of American style espresso coffee shops called Columbus Café, that sells espresso drinks and fresh-baked muffins (to die for!).

After a few warm days, the weather changed and it started to rain. Leaving the bike at the hotel one day, we took the metro into town and went to eat lunch at Sesame. Looking out at the canal through the large plate glass windows, I watched the showers come and go, dimpling the water of the canal. A single person sat at the edge of the canal, an old woman fishing in the murky green water. When it would begin to rain, she’d pull the umbrella out from under her chair and huddle under it for a few minutes until it stopped, then fold up the umbrella and replace it under her chair. A perfect day for sitting around, so I pulled out the laptop and did some work while Mike read and sipped a perfect latte. Lunch had been a Tartin; a piece of peasant bread this time topped with mozzarella and cherry tomatoes, served with a small green salad and cold new potatoes on the side.
 

The heat wave has broken and we are back the typical showery weather pattern. From Paris, we headed east and spent a couple nights in Strasbourg, about 300 miles away and near the German border. It is a very picturesque area and has a very German feel; the names of the towns and the streets are German, the food is German but you are still in France. The older locals speak a patois mix of German and French which can still be heard. We are not planning to spend much time this trip exploring the charms of the Alsatian villages, with their villages of half-timbered houses alternating with fields of corn and grain. We have an appointment at a manufacturers of leather motorcycle clothing called Spool, where Mike was able to get a set of leathers for an amazingly cheap price.

Heading out of Strasbourg, we went north, with the goal of reaching a town just over the German border called Pirmasens where we wanted to visit a manufacturer of bike intercoms (Baehr). The sky was grey with incipient rain but the ground was still dry so we headed off towards the small roads through thickly forested valleys, moisture hanging in the air as fog just above the ground. We stopped for lunch at a small restaurant in a small town, still on the French side of the border and had a quick meal. It was a bit disconcerting to speak to the waitress because she seemed to be speaking a strangely accented German and although I spoke German to her we had a hard time understanding each other. My lunch consisted of potatoes with onions, fried to a dark brown with a small pot of cream cheese with chives and garlic on the side. A small green salad and a couple of slices of ham and cured ham rounded out the plate. It was simple but absolutely delicious, a comfort-food meal for a grey day like today.

After getting a new intercom installed (oh yay! It’s so nice to have something that works right! It really is nice to be able to talk to each other as we ride), we rode through a sudden downpour to a town called Annweiler to find a hotel for the night. It turned out to be a cute little town of old Fachwerk houses with a canalized river running through town powering mill wheels that a few hundred years ago provided power to the bark mill and tanners. Now the wheels have been converted and now turn the water’s energy to electricity for the town. Other, more recent homes from the 1800’s were built from an unusually colored dark rose pink sandstone found in this area. A castle called Trifels sits on a high peak overlooking town; an unusually plain square building with a steeply pitched roof of terra cotta tiles.

Fachwerk is the German term for the quaint old houses built in the style we would call half-timbered. It was a common (and probably the cheapest and easiest) construction method of the 16- and 1700’s. A wooden frame was put together, and stood up to form the outer walls, much like the 2X4 frames which form the inner walls of modern houses. The difference here is that the timbers remain exposed and the spaces between were filled with some material such as a mixture of mud and straw, or brick. The filler material was then plastered over and the wood timber painted with some preservative. I saw a few fachwerk houses in the process of being restored; stripped to a skeleton of wood, the mud and straw filling is often being replaced with something more supportive like bricks. Over time, the half-timbered houses tended to sag, houses leaning companionably on each other and the horizontal beams gently warped or slanted with age.

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Suitehotel and Etap can be found on the web - as well as all the other brother and sister hotels - by going to www.accor.com

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