Alsace Wine Tour – Hinsbourg day 2

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Hinsbourg day 2

The municipal campsite here at Hinsbourg has been quiet overnight. There is a bread van that calls in the morning around 8:30 am, so I am stood near the reception at the appropriate time, there is one other person waiting too. We wait, wait and wonder if the bread will arrive, finally, around 9 am a small white van appears and a loud horn announces its presence to the whole campsite. People appear from nowhere and suddenly there is a long queue, spaced out with some social distancing. I purchase a baguette with grains, €1.53, then retreat to the Hymer. I am surprised how much bread and other things people are buying.

We discuss what to do next on this trip. The hot weather has thrown our plans into disarray, the original intention was to head over to the Alsace, then spend the time moving from wine producer to wine producer staying on their properties. We did that previously and really enjoyed the time spent there, however, there was no shade and temperatures were a lot lower, in what you might call the normal range. This time we are in the middle of a heatwave with dire warnings being bandied around by the weather forecasters. Gill is finding the heat overpowering, so we need to be careful. We decide that we will stay here at Hinsbourg, take a walk around the local area and enjoy the campsite.

After lunch we walked down the hill from the campsite to the next village, Frohmuhl, took a short tour along the main road and noted that there was a railway line that passed through. The former water supply was a spring that gushed water into a large trough. A man came and filled up two 5 litre plastic bottles from the spring, so obviously some people still like to collect their water from here. We have seen that happening in other places too, some people like to have spring water that they know has no chlorine added.

From Frohmuhl we take a footpath that leads up behind a row of houses, then into the forest. The path takes the shortest route up the hill, around 45°, straight up, no switchbacks or bends. We climbed slowly before emerging onto hot dry fields behind some houses in Hinsbourg, then make our way slowly back to the campsite. We are not used to walking in this heat, google maps tells me that we have walked 1.6 miles, it feels like a lot more. We sit out, insects become troublesome, wasps and other flying things. A red kite and a kestrel fly over the wood opposite, the kite moving with great ease and no apparent effort while the kestrel appears to work hard to hover over the field and wood.

Military aircraft fly by, low and fast, no concessions to greenery or wokery — in the sense of using less fuel, performance is what counts, it can make the difference between mission success and failure.

We rest and watch people arrive and set up on the pitches around us, very interesting.