It was weird being the only “French” people in the German campground the last few days. Almost all the campers were German or Swiss with a handful of Austrians and Dutch thrown in. We had the only French tags and I felt a certain responsibility to represent. So I cooked a little outside and thought about today being the 80th anniversary of the French Résistance. I did not surrender – I had crossed the Rhine.

I look German and my name is German. I am actually very comfortable being in Germany though I wasn’t always. I don’t understand much German and speak even less, but I am a lot more confident of my accent than I am in France. That probably stems from the seemingly endless hours my grandfather spent making sure I could say “Salz und Pfeffer” properly. Ironically, I can speak more French than I can understand I do love a good wurst and German pilsner is the second best kind of pilsner there is. I drank my share of Konig which is brewed in Offenburg (the closest German place big enough to be called a city).

Today we are back in France. The campground resort near Strasbourg is reopening tomorrow and I have booked us in for a week. After that some of the campgrounds up in the mountains are supposed to open so we will try them out. But tonight we are at the municipal aire of Orschwiller which is really nice. There are a couple of shops, a clean bathroom, showers, camper sewage services, picnic tables, and it is far enough from the highway that you have to focus to hear it. It is also free, which is nice because Camping Strasbourg costs almost as much as an American campground would. Are you wondering why I started this blog with a picture of my window? Let me zoom in a little: