In Paris, we paid little regard to the weather, except to notice that it was hot and dusty.  It remained this way for the entire duration of our stay there.

We did not bother to check the forecast.   Even it if did decide to rain, there were dozens of indoor places — museums and such — to ride out the storm, or there was the Metro to get us home in a relatively dry fashion.

Here in Colmar, the lovely capital of the Alsace region, we quickly noticed it was not as dusty, but the skies were still sunny.  We proceded in our charmed vacation existence not giving much thought to the weather report.

Tiny oversight.

Today dawned bright again.  We hustled out to rent bikes and zip out of the city on dedicated lanes, looking for a trail that would take us through the famous Alsacean wine country.  Stocked with multiple maps and general directions from the bike shop staff, we cruised along…until Turkheim,  which is a lovely town, but it lacks seriously for  coherent bike route signage.

We circulated through several key intersections multiple times trying to figure out what the painted arrows on the ground and the nice signs with grapes and bikes were trying to tell us.  Whatever it was, it did not synch with our Haute-Alsace a Velo map, which suggested we should find a cushy, two-laned bike path.

Again, I feel the need to comment that we were in lovely surroundings.  Turkheim, like many of the towns and villages here, has buildings and architecture that seems to go back to the middle ages.  Here, like in many towns we’ve seen, there is a large church central to the downtown, with a roof of grey tile latticed with bright green in a style that we’ve only seen in this region.   The hills around the town are quite literally covered with green rows of grape vines, practically every meter used for agriculture.   There was not a ton of car traffic, but a lot of people aobut.  It was a pleasant place to hunt around for a bike path.

Eventually, after ever-widening loops of the city trying to pick up the lost trail, we found a sign with grapes on it possibly pointing up a lane.  We followed, bolstered by input from other cyclists that they were “99 percent” sure this was the route.

It wasn’t a dedicated bike path, and it was rather steep, but we climbed and hoped.  We also were agog at the scenery when we managed to take it in.  For 270 degrees of our view, rows of vines covered the hillsides in patchwork sections. For the remaining 90 degrees, Turkheim wrapped around its central church in the valley, and beyond that lay Colmar in the distance.

It was still sunny.  And rather hot on the way up.

On the other side of the mountain was a lovely little village called Neidermorschwihr, which, while somewhat sleepy, will henceforth go down in history as the place where we discovered tarte flambe.  It sounds like a dessert set on fire, but it’s really kind of an Alsacean pizza with no tomato sauce and a really thin crust.  Most have cheese of some local variety, onions and bacon pieces.  Mine had mushrooms, too.

As we had lost a little time in Turkheim and we weren’t really sure how to find the actual bike path (we decided over lunch that the grape sign we followed up the hill was for the automobile Wine Trail, which was nice, but a little to narrow and car-travelled for our liking).

Still, we would not be deterred.  There were villages out there to be explored and we got directions from our waitress to a nice-sounding one.

Down the hill we rode, via a different route from the one we ascended.  Through a town, around a few round abouts, along a road that wasn’t too narrow. We veered off onto what looked like an underpass and, viola, it was the bike path!  Clear signs, fellow cyclists and everything!

We happily started following it to the next town — we could see the steeple of the church not five kilometers away.

Then it started drizzling.  Over the mountains had seeped grey clouds that were rapidly overtaking the blue sky.  Dark grey clouds.  Kind of black in places.  There was some thunder, clearly on the other side of the mountain from us.  And maybe a flash of lightning.  We hoped to reach the village and ride out the storm in a cafe, but then the path let us down.  Suddenly there was a no-bike sign and the paved path turned to grass.  We were riding along the outskirts of a residential neighborhood, and apparently we were supposed to navigate this to the center of town,  but there were no signs to guide us.

The skies got darker.  The drops of rain persisted.

We had to fold.  We reversed our direction and followed the bike path back to where we discovered it.  There were signs for Colmar  We could follow the bike path all the way back to our base camp, and that’s what we did.

But the rain would catch up to us.

We got pretty wet .  And some of us got pretty excited about riding through vinyards (this was where the bike path was hiding all this time, in the vinyards!) during a thunder storm.  The wind kicked up, the rain grew in intensity and we sloshed through about 10 kilometers of bike path, then city roads to get back.

On the plus side, we did it in pretty good time.  People who were not at all anxious to ride up a hill in the sunshine, were quite keen to ride quickly in the rain once they saw a few lighning flashes (it should be noted that we did not see lightning touch the ground — all the flashes were way up in the sky and if they did strike the ground it was on the other side of the mountain from us).

This adventure cured us of our weather complacency.  As soon as we were in dry clothes, we checked the weather report.  It confirmed that there were “a few showers around” today and that there would be same situation tomorrow.

Sadly, this meant some changes in plans.  Although we had rented the bikes for two days, with the hopes of perhaps riding tomorrow to the German border, we decided to return them this evening.  During a gap in the percipitation, we rode them back to the store.

Then as the rain started again, we walked to the city center and found the wine and pretzel pavilion.  There was one table left that was mostly out of the rain.  It was good wine and good pretzels.

The rain eventually stopped and we walked home.  The silver lining came not long after we settled back in.  Jen discovered that the car we’d reserved to rent starting tomorrow would actually be available at noon and not at 5 like we’d originally requested.  We’ll have time to poke around a little after we pick it up.

We may get to the German border after all, or perhaps to one of those little towns in the hills.

Rain or shine.