It’s still kinda dark outside, but a twelve mile LSR takes about two hours to accomplish- it’s always best to get out the door while traffic is still sleepy. Fluorescent running gear is only half the battle; I don’t think motorists exactly like runners. And we don’t like them much, either.
Unlike our run together in Budapest, this should be a fairly straightforward run for Christina and me. It’s simply a matter of adhering to our strategy of “follow but don’t cross the river”.
We’re about a mile or so into our run along the water and then this neat building catches our attention. “That’s a cool building” Christina observes, “It looks like….” she pauses. “A mosque.” I finish her sentence. We’re both checking out the neat architecture- so much so that neither of us catch on to the fact that we area kind of trotting over a stretch of canal. Without realizing it, we’re about to throw our pre-planned running course out the window.
Still blissfully ignorant of the fact that we are turned around and have lost our primary river reference point, the fall colors are keeping us pacified as we trudge through the orange leaves. On running trails alone Strasbourg can be classified as wonderful, and I’m grateful to have gotten the opportunity to see the city under such conditions. Still, we continue to head straight for a long, long time…probably too long as the case would be.
The leaves can only look pretty for so long. It’s time to stop and consult our handy tourist map to figure out why we haven’t curve around in the big circle as planned. I leave Christina to her Army skills of orienteering while I seize the opportunity to be useless and snap photos of her handiwork.
Time to turn around, and loop back up the canal of deception that led us astray in its autumnal beauty.
See! Check out these signs. I so swear that they are in German. I’m kinda francophone, but I have no clue where I am or what these words mean.
My Senegal radar is always on, and as we make our back to city center I spy this advertisement at a bus stop. It boggles my mind that people in such a gorgeous city might want to check out Senegal…but then again I understand that folks like to visit spots bearing little resemblance to the places that they live. Which is why I’m loving Strasbourg.
We run around the perimeter of the old city, and it is just as pretty as the tree lined canal. Only this is the waterways that we were originally seeking.
Modern art, Strasbourg style. I made Christina cross the river one more time so I could take a picture of this pole. We made sure to cross the river directly after my Kodak moment in order to ensure we finished our twelve miles and rewarded ourselves with a stop at a famous sweet shop on the central island.
Our Garmins beep at more or less twelve miles and we find ourselves in the middle of a commercial center that has finally woken up. It’s Monday morning and people are heading to work to open up their shops or set up massive Christmas trees. I love this time of year!
And at last we reach our planned destination, a pastry shop that came highly recommended by the very nice Olmsted scholars who used to live here. One thing that is great about this scholarship that I’m on is the fact that you get plugged into a network of great people with valuable local insights.
Hey, I just ran 12 miles. There’s nothing wrong with picking some of this stuff up in the name of l‘enrichissement culturel. These chocolate and praline guys are shaped like opening chestnuts, which I always love to check out as the cover the ground in the fall.
In addition to the sweet shop, we were excited to pass by a place selling bagels. We’re Yanks, so there’s nothing better than a bagel as a post long run meal. Looking like fish out of water, we took our sweaty bodies inside the shop and ordered up some quasi-New York style goodness. I personally liked their decor best, and I checked out the wall to see if they had Whitey Bulger’s mug on their FBI’s Most Wanted Display.
In case you were wondering, this red line traces the route that we ended up taking (thank you, GarminConnect!). Our initial goal in heading out the door was to complete a big circle that would take us up near the “g” seen here in the word Strasbourg. What we wanted to do was run by the European Parliament…but as you can see we kinda went the exact wrong way. Remember folks, we’re military officers that are protecting our country. As my old Commodore used to say, “We can’t even plan our way out of a paper bag”. Awesome.
No matter, the run was a success as we got in our miles and rewarded ourselves appropriately before hopping into the car and driving for four hours. At the moment, my hamstrings kinda hate me for not really stretching post-run- but it was a well-worth blur of tourism.