Friday, Mulhouse (moo looze) is a lovely city with lots of tree lined streets and little parks, we went walking last night just looking at the old French architecture, buildings are lovely. Lots of churches which are very grand with multiple steeples and made of beautiful stone blocks with very intricate carved details. The old town area is just lovely with bright colored buildings with turrets and grey slate roofing, lots of paved squares and people areas. Outside the old town area there are more modern buildings, shopping centers etc with bus and very modern tram links. A bit of rain today but we dodged it by going to the automobile museum which is about 1.5k from the centre of town, used to be an area of woolen mills with one of the owners being a car nut who started collecting cars and ended up with a huge collection but the wool business went bad so ended up with great storage for the vehicles but unfortunately lost the vehicles to pay his bills. The collection was not split up but added to and now is semi government funded with a number of cars on loan from other museums. The collection is just outstanding with the largest number of Bugatti cars in one museum including Liz's favorite which is a dark blue and silver Veyron which she adored and which I would be happy for her to buy but the price tag of 1.3 million euros would be a bit beyond us. The collection starts off with the first built cars and runs right through to fairly modern cars it includes a huge number of different makes mostly european and a lot of outstandingly beautiful cars in exquisite condition. It even includes a large number of Grand Prix cars from the early 30's right through to modern day plus a number of closed sports cars from Le Mans fame.
The museum is the largest in Europe and we can certainly believe that and again it is outstanding in the quality and presentation of the vehicles on show.
So far have found only a few boulangeries (bakeries) and have eaten the very french baguettes which are absolutely lovely and sampled some pastries, cakes and other creations along the way, no creations like Paris yet but very tasty all the same.
Not a lot of English speakers out this way so sometimes have a problem with understanding what we want but they are very patient and lovely people so all going well at present. We are both awaiting the tour which finishes about a kilometer from where we are, with the start the next day about another 1.5k away on the other side of town, hopefully the rain will stay away for both finish and start as we want to experience the atmosphere of the tour. There are noticeably more people turning up so we assume they are also here to catch the tour.
Will keep updating as we go.