Eat breakfast in one country and dinner in another
The bakery in Kehl still smells of warm pretzels when you cross the Rhine into France. The Passerelle des Deux Rives takes under ten minutes to walk, but the accents change before your coffee has cooled — German clipped, then French, softer, on the far bank. From there it's another forty minutes on foot into Strasbourg's old town, past shopfronts that could be Basel's, until you're eating choucroute for dinner in a country you didn't wake up in. By dusk the cathedral's pink stone turns the colour of the meal you just had.
Practical
- Cost
- $100–250 for train, meals and drinks
- Best time
- Spring through early autumn, for a comfortable walk over the Rhine
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time it takes
- A full day, breakfast to dinner
- What people get wrong
- People expect a passport check or a currency change at the border; there's neither, since both towns use the euro and Schengen means no checkpoint. The real error is timing — arrive in Strasbourg after 2pm and half the good lunch spots are shut until dinner.
- With
- A group