We were especially lucky because just a six-minute walk from their house, they have an unoccupied studio apartment, which they were kind enough to offer us for the duration of our stay.
The morning after our arrival, we emerged to find that Breisach is a surprisingly lovely little town. A spired cathedral sits atop a steep hill, along with houses that are part of the walled-in old city. Below the cliffs, like extra decorations that wouldn't fit on the cake above, Tudor and chalet-style houses and shops spread out into the space between the walls and the Rhine. To get to Geoff and Sarah's house from their apartment, the walk takes us through the only remaining stone gate and then across cobbled streets edged by welcome mats in German.
Geoff tells us that one of the good things about Briesach is that the whole town has speed limits of thirty km/h or less. I assume he means for Andrea's safety, because he can run around and play without speeding traffic to worry about. The thing is, I'm pretty sure little Andrea spends most of his time going faster than that (the kid's a blur), so they are just asking for a pocketful of speeding tickets.
We spent the first weekend with the family dividing our time between the house and walks through the town, plus a drive up into wine country for the views.
Beautiful Breisach in Germany is now home to Kyle's school friend Geoffrey, and his family
Murals adorn many of the area's homes
And the area is surrounded with the local wine industry
During the work week, Geoff and Sarah lent us their two electric bicycles. We really like electric bicycles. The terrain in this part of Germany is mostly flat, with a few hills thrown in for variety. The electric boost really helps to flatten out the hills, which made it easy to put in double the miles we would have even attempted on a manual bike. We had a lovely time, arriving back at the house weary and saddle-sore, but with big smiles at our day out in wine country.
The bicycles gave us the chance to explore some of the equally charming nearby towns and scenery, and it was easy to cross one of the many bridges over the Rhine to France
We had a rainy, cozy day at the house, and then we loaded up their car for a trip to the nearby "big" city of Freiburg. Sarah studied there in college and knows the place inside and out. It is also beautiful, but is a bit hectic compared to Briesach, making it necessary to constantly keep an eye on Andrea any time he gets to close to traffic or wanders too far into the crowd ahead. Briesach feels very much like a small island where anybody who finds him will happily take him by the hand and deliver him home.
Freiburg was the nearest German city, and we were expertly guided by Sarah who had studied there many years ago
One very nice touch to Freiburg (and many of the nearby towns) is the series of man made brooks (Bächle), mini-canals that run through the streets, once as water supply and fire protection. They remain now to keep the wine cool in the summer, and also provide drinking water for thirsty dogs, and allow children to tow little boats along them by strings.
A few days later, Geoffrey took us into Staufen, which is an impossibly pretty little village full of adorable shops and crisscrossed with the same type of miniature cooling canals as Freiburg.
Staufen was equally charming
On our last day in Breisach, which was also Easter Sunday, Geoff and Sarah booked us on a brunch cruise of the Rhine. It was just brilliant! It feels like a strange thing to say, but it was so nice to be out on the water, even if it was in a giant boat that had had no sense of the wavy motion of smaller boats. We went up and down the Rhine, including a transit each way of a big lock with a ten-meter lift. After last seeing Geoffrey and Sarah in French Polynesia in 2018, they subsequently went on to buy a canal boat, which they took through the canals near their base in Dublin, Ireland. One great statistic that Geoffrey told me was that, as an infant, Andrea had been through forty-three locks before he had ever ridden in an elevator. As we went along the Rhine, we reminisced about our respective time on various canal systems while enjoying a delicious meal.
And we were treated to a beautiful river boat lunch cruise on the Rhine, and managed a lock or two without having to touch any lines!
Briesach has been really great and Geoff, Sarah and Andrea have really made a nice life for themselves here. One of the first tidbits of information we were given about the town was that Breisach has five ice cream shops. (Maryanne found a secret sixth shop.) With my goal of collecting samples from all five (six), I had some structure to my visit, with which Andrea was all too happy to help.
Breisach is a regular stop on the river cruise ship route. They get a lot of Americans, but English is not particularly widely spoken. This is when it's great to have Geoff around. It's such a pleasure to watch him conversing at the Saturday Market with all of his German friends in their native tongue. He's always happy to step in and translate when I get stuck. He also speaks Swedish, Hindi and most of the other Scandinavian languages as well. At one point, he explained to me that since Breisach is a border town, French is also widely spoken. Geoff says he doesn't speak French, but he knows so much about languages generally that he is much better at it than I am, even though I think of French as the local language I have a chance at understanding. At one point, on a solo visit to ice cream shop number five, after not getting any of the proprietor's German, I remembered the thing about how I could use French. I accidentally said, "I'm sorry, I cannot speak English" in my best French, to which the guy responded, "Oh, you're American!", in English.
After explaining that I wasn't one of the passengers from the cruise ship, but that I was visiting a local friend, he looked a bit perplexed. When I explained about Geoffrey, a slight glimmer came over his face. When I mentioned Andrea, he knew exactly who I was talking about. Geoff told me a story about how on one of their first visits to Breisach, Andrea dropped his ice cream cone. Before anybody could even realize what had happened, the proprietor appeared with an exact replacement. That's the kind of place it is.
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