TdE - Day 29 Umkirch - Saint Hippolyte

Route: Umkirch - Breisach (New &Old) - Colmar - Route du vin - Saint Hippolyte 
Distance: 85 km
Elevation: 469 m
Duration: 5:26 h
Weather: generally sunny with some clouds, plus one major downpour in Colmar

Today I entered the last new country of this trip: France!

And this was probably the last time I see the Rhine before joining it again at home in Leiden. 

From here onwards I plan to follow EuroVelo 5 all the way to Brussels and then see from there how to get back to Leiden.

My first stop was Neuf Breisach, a fortified village constructed as the ideal garrison, and on the plan it is interesting and still totally maintains this form:

But in reality at least inside it looks like a very depressing, small town. Not very well maintained. What was impressive though were the fortifications:

My next stop was Colmar, a city that I already visited in the past. I had hoped for a bit less tourists due to Covid travel restrictions on non-Europeans, but no, the city was pretty packed with tourists. So I wonder how it looks like normally when also all the international tourists are there! But it looks nice:

One can already see in this picture that it was starting to rain. At that moment it was more like a drizzle, but as it became stronger I searched for a hiding spot and luckily found one under a roof in front of a Fnac. Not totally ideal, but it protected me from the ensuing downpour, that within minutes transformed the street in front of me into two, small, rivers. So I had a forced stop at Colmar for about 45 minutes, and not in the absolutely nicest place of town, but at least reasonably dry. 

After Collar I first encountered the cycle path that should bring me closer to home. Here it generally does NOT go through all the small villages but instead stays somewhere below them, so I had tweaked it to go through the villages. Tomorrow instead I plan to follow it a bit more strictly, also because tomorrow it actually does go through the main villages! 

All these villages now in my head kind of combine into one, with a city gate (often looking quite similar)…

… old, half timbered houses…

.. and often a main square:

But quite arbitrarily some of these villages (e.g. Riquewihr) we’re totally flooded with tourists, others such as Turckheim or Bergheim had hardly any (in comparison), but looked pretty similar ‘, except the absence of all the tourist shops.