Reverence for life

Firstly, what encouraged Kim to cycle 30km, on a Brompton, when there’s a perfectly good car sitting in the car park?

Answer? Cheese!

It’s stopped raining so with the aid of dedicated cycle paths and our Komoot cycle app, we cycled peacefully along the Vosges valley to the Munster Cheese Museum. It’s our first time using Komoot for navigation and we’re impressed, a laid back voice successfully directing us from inside Kim’s pocket.

We were too late to book a full guided tour of the museum but the static information displays together with quite a whiff of cheese about the place was interesting. We now know that the edible part of cheese is known as paste even though it doesn’t come out of a tube.

The Albert Schweitzer museum, in Gonsbach, was closed for lunchtime so we detoured up into Munster for our own refreshments before heading back to a lovely little museum in Schweitzer’s house.

Nobel prize winner philosopher and physician, Schweitzer was a true humanitarian. The overarching principle that guided him was ‘reverence for life‘, a philosophy that took him to Lambarene in Gabon, where he established a hospital healing many and touched the lives of millions worldwide.

After the museum we climbed the Sentier Weg footpath up out of town stopping at signs quoting Schweitzer philosophy which we didn’t understand before cycling back, past fields, through woodland and alongside rivers.

We will leave you with this Schweitzer quote – ‘There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats’. Guess who agrees and who is wheezing in a corner .