Road Scholar French Canal Voyage By Barge: Discover Alsace-Lorraine

In October of 2016 my longtime family friend, Charlie Kientzler invited me on an all expense paid trip to France. This portion of the trip was a Road Scholar canal barge tour on the Hotel Barge MS Madeleine "French Canal Voyage By Barge: Discover Alsace Lorraine". The first day and a half we spent touring Strasbourg, France. The Notre Dame Strasbourg cathedral was one of the highlights.

We also had time to tour one of the museums (Archeology), take a canal sightseeing tour through the city and got to walk around and explore on our own for a few hours. From there we boarded the canal barge MS Madeleine, a small canal barge with 24 cozy rooms. The barge MS Madeleine took us 65 miles through 41 locks over a 6 day period cruising at around 3 mph, an easy pace to keep up with on foot if we wanted to walk along the canal tow path between locks. Some of the highlights of our canal cruise on the MS Madeleine were:

• Arzviller Inclined Plane: A huge bathtub on rails that took us 500-600' (148" vertical) up the side of a mountain
• Grand Tunnel D'Arzviller: A canal tunnel 1.4 miles long that took about a half hour to cruise through
• Aqueduct: A portion of the canal encased in a bridge that ran over a roadway
• Rechicourt Lock: A single lock that went down 50 feet. We exited through a smaller trap door at the bottom of the lock
• Sarrebourg: There we visited a chapel with a large stained glass window by Marc Chagall
• Chateau de Haut Barr Castle: The ruins of an ancient castle outside Saverne, France
• Chateau de Lutzelbourg: Another castle above Lutzelbourg. This was a spectacular location

Before the tour Charlie and I rented a car and first drove north from Strasbourg to visit the Maginot Line museum at Hackenburg, then south to visit the Kientzler family winery.

It was an awesome trip!