Today's post comes to you from the beautiful Hotel des Têtes in Colmar, France. I have been trying for a few days to contact the hotel that I had planned on staying at here in Colmar to make a reservation, but haven't been able to get an answer after an email and several phone calls, so I decided to roll in to Colmar today without a reservation and see what else I could find. The first place I came to was this beautiful hotel right in the center of Colmar. The place is a little spendy, but it's in a great location, has good free parking (which is extremely valuable in a European city), and most importantly, has a jacuzzi, so I decided to splurge and stay here.
I had a great day today exploring Alsace and the Route des Vins, and I'll talk about that in a moment, but first I want to wrap up my story from yesterday. So again to summarize what had happened, I found a very cool place in the Vosges Mountains that was not mentioned in my guidebook, met a young French hippy guy there, and gave him a ride home to his parents' farm. The place was way up in the Vosges Mountains, probably even higher than the abbey I had discovered, and way the heck out in the middle of nowhere. There was at least a mile of dirt road after the paved road ended before we even got to the property, and the property itself was pretty ramshackle, complete with an exposed electrical wire running up the hillside to their house (I suspect they may be stealing electricity). When we arrived Hugo had to gingerly kick a branch off of the wire while trying not to touch it, while I watched and wondered what I would do if he got electrocuted. Luckily that didn't happen though.
So Hugo invited me in and I met his dad. Unfortunately I didn't get his name, but he was a nice guy. Stern and quiet, but nice and friendly nonetheless. Hugo talked to him first in French, I assume explaining why I was there, and then his dad started talking to me in French. I couldn't make out what he was saying, so I told him "I'm sorry, I don't speak French" in French, to which he promptly replied in English, "Yes you do, you just did." I immediately took a liking to him. He motioned for me and Hugo to go sit at the kitchen table while he went down into his wine cellar (and these folks were far from rich - in fact I suspected they were a tad poor - but it seems that in France everyone who can has a wine cellar) and brought up a fine bottle of locally produced Alsatian Riesling. It was a very good wine, not as sweet as the Riesling we have back home.
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| Interior of the homemade house |
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| The excellent bottle of Alsatian Riesling |
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| Another random shot of the interior of my new friends' house |
Hugo's dad had some other business to attend to so he left me and Hugo with the bottle of wine, but soon enough Hugo's mom arrived home. She spoke no English but did speak German, so I was able to talk to her a little bit with my limited German and that was a lot of fun. I also boned up on my French quite a bit just by listening to the family talk. Hugo's mom seemed particularly appreciative that I had seen him safely home, and she tried to give me a bit of everything they had in their kitchen. She brought out their finest cheese (I can't remember what it was called, but it was locally made - like at the farm next door - and very good), some locally produced cured meat of some kind, and a few other goodies. The thing she gave me that touched me most was a half-eaten fruit pudding thingee that Hugo told me she had saved from a recent trip to a Christmas market. I could tell that these folks were far from rich and probably very rarely had the opportunity to indulge in little treats like that, and she had probably saved the rest of it to enjoy herself later, but she insisted that I have it instead. I felt a little guilty, but also very grateful and moved.
We must have spent a few hours at that table eating, drinking, and talking. The family would talk among themselves, occasionally Hugo would tell me what they were saying, or his mom would talk to me in German or ask Hugo to tell me something in English, or his dad would talk to me in English. To be welcomed in the home of this family, to be treated like a friend despite having just met them all, and to have the chance to see and experience life as these people did on a daily basis, was wonderful. I was positively beaming, and even when I finally bid the family good night and returned to my hotel to go to bed, I was smiling the whole way home. Experiences like that are a large part of what keeps me coming back here. Every trip has yielded a special connection like that, and never when I was expecting it. No amount of money can buy those connections and interpersonal interactions, and those experiences are what I love most about travel.
I gave Hugo my email address before I left so that we could keep in touch, went back to my hotel, and promptly went to bed. I had a long day ahead of me, and I would need the rest.
I had been going to bed fairly early (for me) over the last few days, so I checked out of my hotel and was on the road by 10:00 am. I knew that I would be driving a lot today and I was down to less than half of a tank of gas, so my first priority was to get gas. I also wanted to buy some picnic food for the road so that I could eat whenever was convenient and not waste time finding food as I went. So I drove into Sélestat, the town near my hotel, and found a big supermarket/miniature shopping mall called Intermarché. It was seriously like a miniature shopping mall, with about 10-15 stores inside, and also a really big (by European standards) supermarket. It also had a good gas station, the only one I could find that took cash (since American credit cards generally don't work at automatic payment places like self-service gas stations, which abound in France). So I gassed up, got a bunch of picnic food (my go-to combo of bread+meat+cheese, some salad, orange juice, drinkable yogurt, milk and cookies) that would feed me for the day and then some (total cost about 20 euros, half of what I would spend in a day eating out of cafes/restaurants), and hit the road.
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| A random shot I took on the road this morning |
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| The huge and very cool French supermarket |
My first destination was a place called Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg, a medieval castle up in the Vosges Mountains. You could see it from the plain down below, and it certainly looked worthy of a visit from afar. The scenic drive was half of the fun, but the destination was really the star of the show. I had never heard of this place before reading the short note about it in my guidebook, and I can't imagine why, because it had to be among the most scenic castles I have ever visited in Europe. I would say it's right up there with Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, the castle after which Cinderella's castle was modeled. And unlike Neuschwanstein, the Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg was built in the 12th century (although much of what we see today is reconstruction after the castle was severely damaged in the 17th century) and actually served for centuries as a functional stronghold.
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| Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg |
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| Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg |
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| Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg |
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| Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg |
I toured the castle inside and out and took a boat load of pictures, but after an hour or two I had seen enough, so I moved on and kept driving southward along the Route des Vins. I stopped and walked around several towns along the Route des Vins - Bergheim, Ribeauvillé, Hunawihr, Riquewihr, and Kaysersberg - and each had some defining characteristic that made it worth visiting. Bergheim had a enchanting medieval fairy tale character with the ruins of a very cool medieval wall surrounding it. Ribeauvillé was a great town for shopping and had some promising-looking restaurants. Hunawihr was very cute and yet also un-touristy, with a beautiful little church on the side of a hill and houses that seem to be more or less unchanged since they were built centuries to go. Riquewihr was like Bergheim, with a great medieval character to it and a cool wall surrounding it, and had a very good Christmas market and a whole bunch of great little shops and streetside bakeries. Kaysersberg had the best Christmas market I've encountered in Alsace, where I had a really good Tarte Flambée, some Vin Chaude, and picked up a Christmas gift. By the time I left Kaysersberg it was getting dark and I had had a long and very enjoyable day exploring Alsace, so I headed down to Colmar, the last and largest city on the Route des Vins, where I had planned on spending the next couple of nights.
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| Bergheim |
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| Hunawihr |
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| Tarte Flambée in Kaysersberg |
My days in Alsace had not prepared me well for Colmar. I was used to light traffic, serene villages, and beautiful scenery. I did not realize before I got there just how city-like Colmar is. It isn't a very big city, but it definitely is a city, with the traffic snarls, maze of one way streets and no parking zones, and all of the other little headaches that go along with driving in European cities. My plan had been to locate and drive by a few of the hotels my guidebook recommended and then drop in to the most promising-looking of them to see if they had any rooms available, but that plan changed quickly when I encountered the dense Friday evening traffic. I searched for a while without success for a place to park, until finally I arrived at a parking garage where I found a precious open spot. As it happened I had arrived very close to the center of Colmar, and I discovered that I was very close to the "classiest" (read: most expensive) listing in my guidebook. Given the severe difficulty I had experienced just finding a place to park, I decided to give it a try even knowing I would be spending a small fortune. I talked to the guy at the front desk who was very kind and professional, and he advised me that they did indeed have one room left, a jacuzzi suite, for ~190 euros per night (that's in the neighborhood of $250). Bear in mind, I very rarely spend more than 60-80 euros per night when I'm traveling. Sticker shock scared me off briefly - I told the guy I would keep his hotel in mind, but that I would check around elsewhere. He understood and bid me farewell, and I departed and consulted my guidebook for another option. I tried calling the place that I had wanted to stay at one more time, but once again they did not answer the phone (which makes me wonder if the place might have gone out of business). I tried calling two other places, but neither had a room available for both of the nights I wanted to stay in Colmar. I normally expect and don't mind a little uncertainty and difficulty in finding accommodation when I drop in to a place without a reservation, but tonight I was feeling a bit stressed and the jacuzzi suite was sounding more and more appealing, so I decided to just bite the bullet and go for the expensive place. I returned, quickly made arrangements with the guy at the front desk, and before long I was in my new home for the next couple of days.
The place is very nice, with dark wood paneling, wood beam ceiling, and a large and luxurious bathroom with the promised jacuuzi. I went and retrieved my car and moved it to my hotel's free, gated parking area, and then settled in to type up this blog post and recuperate from the long and tiring day. I had picked up a locally-brewed beer that my French hippy friend Hugo recommended at the supermarket this morning, so I cracked that open and enjoyed it thoroughly. It was a great finishing touch on a very good day of exploration in Alsace.
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