Strasbourg, France

We wanted to go somewhere for 2 nights over the long Memorial Day weekend--our first trip since William was born!  We chose Strasbourg, France because it is only a 1.5 hour drive from our house.  I had never been there, but Jim had, which worked out well because he could show us around.  I also did some research before we left...Strasbourg has one of the best tourism websites I have ever seen.  You can check it out HERE (I am mostly posting the link so I have it for future use!  Scroll down to the bottom for useful links.).

Our first stop was "La Orangerie," the oldest park in Strasbourg.  The Alsace region of France is known for its storks, which were saved from extinction and reintroduced into this park.  All of the tourist shops in this area of France have souvenirs with stork motifs on them.  It was really neat to see the huge stork nests.  We could also see storks flying back and forth across the park with materials for their nests!  

There were other animals in the park as well: flamingos and other birds, goats, and monkeys.

We continued on to the downtown of Strasbourg and saw its gorgeous cathedral.

Near the cathedral was a double decker carousel from 1900.

Hi, Drew and Jim!

A stop for drinks and snacks

Do these photos make you think it is a piece of cake traveling with small kids?  Well, it's not.  Ha!  We have a buggy board on our stroller for Drew to ride on when he gets tired of walking, but even on that, he was doing so much whining that we decided to put him in the stroller and I carried the baby in the Ergo.  I cannot tell you how much our day improved once we did that!!!  I am usually an advocate for kids getting exercise and taking part in seeing the sights, but let's face it--preschoolers don't want to walk around a city all day.  He was quiet and happy in the stroller and that made us happy, too!  

We ran into another American family near the cathedral who had kids around the same age as ours.  We were commiserating about travel with kids and the woman said, "Well, the way we see it is we can be annoyed while sitting at home, or be annoyed while seeing beautiful places."  Well said, my new friend. :)

I really enjoyed Strasbourg.  On Saturdays, there is a flea market, flower market, and farmers' market.  The shops are really cute.  There is a lot to see and we were happy just walking around.  We bought some jam..."quetsches confiture" is very typical of the region; it's a type of plum jam.  We didn't get a chance to go in the yarn shop--next time.

This cookie shop was highly recommended.  We went in circles looking for it, only to find it was right next to the cathedral and we had walked past it a few times.

We spent the night in Strasbourg and explored the "Petite France" area of the city the next morning.

This tree was the opposite of petite.

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