Ribeauville

Ribeauville is a small Alsace town close to Ste Marie aux Mines where I taught at the European Patchwork Carrefour. It has many saxon houses in a bright array of colours, and even the wooden beams are sometimes carved. I love all the brightly coloured geraniums in the window boxes.This town also was part of the great textile printing factories that emerged in this region of France in the eighteenth century and it is possible to visit a factory where cloth is still printed with he original copper printing rolls.It is also worth visiting the Musee de límpression'sur Etoffes in Mulhouse

We visited Ribeauville after we picked up Sandy from the airport in Baden Baden ( and we were two hours late- sorry Sandy)We visited this town after we had dropped our gear at the gite we stayed in in Ste Marie aux Mines. The gite was a tiny flat but had a most delightful aspect onto a back graden, which you would not know existed from the rather drab facade of the building. And in typical French style there was a rather productive small vegetable garden as well- with a wide array of vegetables ( I love vegetable gardens and have taken quite a lot of photos of them over the years- but forgot to photograph this garden). The owners ,an elderly couple, were harvesting apples from their espalliered apple tree, and neatly wrapping the apples in paper and storing them in wooden boxes- which I imagine will be made into some wonderful Alsace apple tart at some stage.

We also got used to the church bells rather quickly. The bells tolled every quarter hour ( so you could not possibly forget the time) and the first night it seemed like we heard every ring- but by day 5 we didn't even wake up in the morning when the bell did it snooze button 6 am action- which was to ring 4 ( to mark the 4 quarters of the hour) then six rings with a different bell and about a minute later another 6 rings- those poor miners had no hope of not getting up!