Our Mini Tour De France

To top off our car troubles, we had more car troubles!  Our third car that just had a new transmission put in it started having transmission problems again.  It is supposed to be under warranty, so we are hoping all goes well with that whole process, but we will have to wait and see.  Probably, there will be a lot of waiting since it took 8 months to get it fixed to begin with.

Thursday of that week, Brian took his sister and family and some of our kids in a rental van to the Rhine River tour.  I stayed home and consequently do not have many pictures of their day trip.  Friday we all went to France, first to Souflenheim (the pottery village that I have been to twice previously) and then to Strasbourg (we've also been there several times.)

Souflenheim, as previously mentioned, is a precious, quaint town that has a plethora of potters that set up shop sometimes right out of their home.  We had a few pieces we were looking for and we found them within a couple of hours.  We didn't shop too long because we had all the kids with us and these shops crowded with breakable pottery are not the place for children.  The dads kept the boys outside while we looked in each shop.  After our shopping was complete, we ate at Creperie Hermine which is always a treat.  The children all got sweet crepes and the adults all got savory ones.  The menu, which is in French and German, is extensive.  

Here's an example of the preciousness of the town.  Nearly every house has amazing flowers like this.

Waiting on the moms to finish shopping

My favorite!

Then we drove a ways further to Strasbourg.  There was a good amount of car sickness going on during all this driving.  The van we rented had 9 seats, arranged in three rows of three seats.  You feel a lot more "closed in" I guess when the seats are so high and go all the way to the end of the car if you know what I am saying.  When we arrived in the city, parking was becoming hard to come by since we were still too tall for any of the parking garages.  After trying one and then having to back up and leave, an elderly French woman in a window three flights up from an apartment building was waving and pointing.  I was sure she was talking to someone else, but everyone else in the van thought she was talking to us.  Turned out she was motioning to us that there was an open lot around the corner to park in.  That just made us all laugh because it is certainly not something you'd see in the states.  In Europe, grandmas just hang out their windows and watch passersby.  In fact, in my village, some of the Opas (Grandpas) that have walkers, will walk up and down the main street and then just take a break sitting in their walker "chair" just watching the cars go by.  I think it's pretty adorable.  They say that the Omas (Grandmas) know everything that happens in the neighborhood.  I believe it.  One neighbor down the street was talking to Brian for the first time ever and knew that we had two boys in the Kindergarten in the next village because our village's Kindergarten was full.

We toured the Gothic cathedral and had a meal of Flammkuchen.  One of the Flammkuchens we ordered had the world's stinkiest cheese on it that we ended up scraping off.  It was too much even for Brian which is really saying something.  

Hello!  How cute is he?

I mean, really, this sweet Bob brings us so much joy, I can't even tell you!

We had promised the children a gelato stop.  We ended up at this chain gelateria that makes their ice cream into flowers.  You can get a macaroon in the middle too, but we'd already all had macaroons so we didn't get that this time.  I was sleepy and chose a scoop of ice cream in my coffee.  It was divine!

Just hanging out in front of an almost 600 year old cathedral, no big deal.

Brian swears we don't look alike.  I'm not seeing it.