How not to go to Strasbourg...

Today we made a quick hop over to the French border town of Strasbourg, a little over an hour from our temporary apartment. It's a beautiful city, but today just didn't seem to be our day. Our first mistake was not researching our trip better. A couple of folks had told me it was easy to find the old part of the city (and it was), but it wasn't quite so obvious where we should park. We ended up trying to parallel park our land yacht (minivan) like highschool kids in driver's ed. Suffice it to say the locals were amused.

We saw a tourist information center on the way into the city, but passed it before we could stop. B wanted to go back, but we'd already found the cool part of the city and I thought it was better to just park. Wrong!

Soon after we parked, we started walking (and walking and walking) along the river, which was filled with some of the biggest swans I've ever seen. Emily is crazy about swans so that suited her just fine.

Although we saw some beautiful sites, I think we would have done a lot less walking if we'd done our homework. Another major faux paux: we forgot Sophia's stroller. Later, we were starving and looking for a place to have lunch and ended up in the touristy part of the city so I didn't want to stop. I assumed we could walk for a few minutes and find places that weren't so crowded and expensive. Wrong! Conservatively speaking, we walked about 240 miles (386.24 kilometers for the non-American readers of this blog).

~700 Swans a-swimming

Anyway... now that we know how NOT to go to Strasbourg, we'll do it better the next time.