Wendy's Platter…travels

October 17, 2025

By the time I got my camera out and figured out how to snap a photo through our window at the Airbnb, only the stragglers were left in the breast cancer march. However, the queen of the march had been placed in the Ribeauvillé square to rest until she was gently removed the next morning to inspire more folks to pay attention to the number one threat of women.

Outside our Ribeauvillé Airbnb was a sea of pink. The small medieval street for the entire block outside our abode was wall to wall folks of all ages and sexes, wearing pink t-shirts, pink headbands, and plenty of high spirits, walking down the street. Keeping the crowd in check were several, very friendly gendarmes keeping the parade moving. And that is what it was…a parade…or rather the end of a 5K walk to honor and raise money for breast cancer awareness. Had Nick and I had known about the walk, we would have joined it. Here’s to our loved ones: Laurie, Becca, Julie, and Jenny. Thank you, Sue and Carrie, for your strength.

Autumn is adding color to the forests on top. The overall neatness of Switzerland was not lost on me.

Once our road was clear, we packed up the car and decided to sneak in one extra country, Switzerland, as we headed towards Besançon. Basel, Switzerland is only about an hour from Ribeauvillé, so we thought a quick look was worth the stop. However, we were unaware that Basel at the moment is tearing up streets faster than Google can re-route us. Even more of a challenge was finding a parking lot. After many wrong turns, many frustrated construction folks pointing to the signs that we missed before we turned onto the street, we found ourselves safely parked, and walking around Münsterplatz, which was eerily empty for such a large space in a busy city.

I am watching the Rhine River. There is a ferry crossing the river using the river current to get it across. It is often referred to as a reaction ferry.

And then it was noon and the platz filled with folks eating lunch, school children jumping rope, and lovers walking along the terrace that looked out on the Rhine River. A food truck set up shop with roasted chestnuts, one of things on my foods-to-do list for France. We got a small bag, sat on one of the many park benches overlooking the river and enjoyed our hot nuggets.

Chestnuts roasting on a …food truck in Basel, Switzerland. It was the perfect warm snack for this cool October day.

Within less than an hour we were on the road again, driving through Switzerland. The roads in Switzerland seemed particularly…Swiss…very precise, cropped, clean. There were many, many tunnels, one as long as 11 kilometers as we wound our way back to France and on to Besançon.

The streets of Besançon. Even the trees in the park remembered that it was autumn and were the correct color like the last time I had been in Besançon 56 years ago.

And then I was home again…that is in Besançon. It was so much bigger than I remembered as a seventeen-year-old. The medieval center of town was much the same as the horseshoe of the Doub River defines the old town. But outside the old town is a city of 120,000 folks with 30,000 students attending the university which was established in 1423.

It was nearly impossible to navigate the small streets, half of which had single barriers in the middle of the street stopping traffic from entering. We later found out that the barriers can be lowered into the ground to allow appropriate traffic, like folks staying in hotels within that area, to pass.

The alleyway to get to our hotel. It was very tight, but Nick got it in to the tiny space and managed to park it as directed. It was pure master parkingmanship.

As soon as we were settled in our hotel, I hit the streets in search of clues as to where our school was, where our favorite patisserie was, and where our favorite Sunday restaurant was. As a reminder, my little sisters and I lived there in 1969, fifty-six years ago. Things (like my memory or the town )might have changed a little.

I texted my younger sister Betsy and sent her some photos hoping her younger brain (she was only fifteen at the time, and is a mere seventy now) would recognize something. Her text back said it all: “It’s hard to walk down memory lane when you can’t find it.”

But it really didn’t matter. Besançon is a lovely, thriving city that has been updated where it was needed and treasured in its architecture. Making the center of town pedestrian-friendly made walking so pleasant and safe.

The patisserie of our youth…or so I think. On the top glass shelf on the left hand side are several cookies. I believe they are the same cookies that enchanted us years ago. On the right I am indulging and it was what I remembered (I think…).

Feeling disappointed that I didn’t recognize anything, we turned a corner and there was a patisserie that looked like the one my sisters and I had coveted when we lived in Besançon. Although we ordered many pastries and baguettes from the shop, there was a particular cookie that we had nearly every day. There on the counter was the cookie, or so it seemed. I asked the counter person, who I thought looked my age, if the patisserie had been there in 1969. She said she hadn’t been born yet, but yes, it was established in 1890.

I swallowed my age pride and ordered two of the cookies and threw in a millefeuille (thousand leaves of pastry separated by custard with a glaze on top) for good measure. Outside the shop, I took a bite of the cookie and found the memory lane I was looking for.

Nick and I often have trouble hitting the dinner hour right in France…we are either too early or too late. Walking the streets of Besançon we found a sandwich board on the street offering a traditional fare. The restaurant was nowhere in sight, but there was an alleyway. We followed the alley for about 50 feet and then it bent and went another 50 feet. A very unobtrusive door quietly had the name of the restaurant on it. We walked in.

A lesson in finding good restaurants…two long halls, a nondescript door, a seemingly underwhelming entrance, and then a lovely cave with excellent food.

Inside were two tiny café tables and a bar with wines behind it. There were no patrons and we wondered if we had made a bad choice. The waitress shooed us in and pointed down the steep stairs to the basement. What we found was a charming cave, what I would have assumed was a wine cellar, but had been painted white to brighten the room. There were about a dozen tables which were empty.

By the time we ordered, the place was mostly filled. It was a popular spot and we could understand why as we tried the Boite du Chef (literally, the Chef’s box…or his/her choice). After dinner we wandered again through the streets while I tried hard to recognize things. We passed a restaurant next to the river that seemed like the spot where we ate our favorite Sunday night dinners. But I didn’t remember the plaza that it now faced. The city was alive with students talking and arguing in the cafés, it reminded me of my Berkeley days.

Early the next morning we had a lovely breakfast at our hotel, then took a last walk around the town. Although we didn’t find the statue of French writer Victor Hugo that I remembered in the town, we found a new one, which I preferred. Victor Hugo was born in Besançon in 1802 and is considered one of France’s great writers.

Leaving Besançon, I was elated that I had walked down that memory lane…even if I couldn’t really find it.

Thiers, our home for the next month is our next stop.

I will leave you with one of Victor Hugo’s many thoughts:

“Ce n’est rien de mourir; c’est affreux de ne pas vivre.”

“It is nothing to die; it is frightful not to live.”

[Note: I added a “Where’s Nick?” photo to a paragraph I added to my last post, Euro Days 30-32 on Strasbourg. If you are obsessed, go back and read the extra paragraph and find Nick!]

©2025 Wendy Platt Hill

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