The next section of the trip was a little bit of a blur for me. I managed to contract some sort of bug as we left Heidelberg and so although we kept up with most of our plans the next few days couldn’t be as full as we had hoped.
Nevertheless, our first stop from Heidelberg was Strasbourg. The first thing we noticed about going into France was the drivers. In Germany even though everyone is driving at ridiculous speeds on the Autobahn, the drivers are very responsible, will never undertake, and rarely do slow drivers sit in the fast lane. The short time that we drove in France demonstrated that this is not a general European trait! French drivers are much more like Aussie drivers.
Strasbourg was a fascinating mix of French and German culture. It was certainly a bit of a shock to our systems trying to work out how to communicate in French rather than German! We visited the very grand catholic cathedral and then also visited Martin Bucer’s, and Calvin’s churches. The outstanding feature of the protestant churches compared to the catholic was how bare they were. Bucer had particularly made a stand against iconography and although there were still stained glass windows, the church was much more sparsely decorated, and interestingly brighter than the cathedral.
We went on to stay in the Black Forest region for a few nights. It was good timing as we simply rested and I certainly needed it, feeling under the weather. We did get to look around the beautiful scenery and really enjoyed the sense of isolation within God’s creation.
From here we drove through the hills towards Lake Constance. The scenery was striking and very enjoyable. When we arrived at Konstanz we were able to visit the Jan Hus museum. He was a Czech reformer who was burnt at the stake in the 1400s for his stance against the Catholic church. We also visited the memorial at the site where he was burnt a the stake, which is right in the middle of a residential area and next to a bus stop! Konstanz itself was much busier that I had expected, it is on the shores of Lake Constance and is obviously a popular tourist destination with a lot of Italian influence. The weather was great and we stayed in a lovely guesthouse for the night before heading onto Switzerland the next day.