Day 11: Colmar

Years ago, when Annemarie and I left our favorite hotel, the concierge helping us to our car noticed the slight drizzle and said, “ahh, Champagne cry because you leave.” This moment goes down in Gray family travel lore – hold on Champagne! We’ll be back!

Germany had shed her tears the day before, and now? Time for us to move on. 

We packed up the Transit and had crossed the Rhine before noon. One of the great frontiers of history, the Rhine, and these days no hint of there ever having been a checkpoint. Not even a “Bienvenue a France” sign – seriously, Georgia makes more of a fuss when you cross over on I-20. "Home of the 1996 Olympics" and all that – please, guys, that Olympics was a failure, you should really stop reminding people about it. Though I guess these days even a catastrophe is worth mentioning. Welcome to Lakehurst, NJ, home of the Hindenburg disaster!

We got to Colmar around 1:00, and dropped our stuff off at the hotel. Le Marechal is quite attractive from the outside, in Colmar’s Petite Venise area – convenient central spot for tourism. At 1:00 parking is impossible, all the places are taken. Why, you ask? Because parking is free from 11:00-2:00, for the lunch crowd, and all the locals, I gather, flood into central Colmar for their relaxing break. I can’t really blame them, it’s lovely there.

The Transit was too big to park in the hotel’s remote parking. We didn’t get a spot on the street until just before 2:00, when folks were starting to leave for their 90 minutes of remaining work. 

We had our lunch at a well reviewed restaurant/deli next to the hotel, Le Comptoir de George. Their kitchen was closed by then, so we were stuck with a limited selection (quiche, charcuterie), not terrible but made up for by the location.

Any town that has a small canal and a few old bridges running over it will call itself “Little Venice” – or, if they have a lot of bridges, they’re “Venice of the [fill in the country/area]”. Same thing happens sometimes with small mountain ranges – there are a dozen “little Switzerlands” scattered across Europe. Usually the comparison is best to be avoided, since it only draws attention to how far superior the original is. I’d say that’s accurate here, too, but once you get beyond the little river and bridges, you discover that Colmar is supremely charming on its own terms.

Yes, it has a mass of tourists: why not? You’re there for the half-timbered houses and crooked streets. Now, you can find that a lot of places, but usually only for an intersection or two. Colmar’s old town is surprisingly vast and varied, with some quite unusual buildings and features, my favorite being the green tiled pyramid roof.

It’s not just the size of the old town that’s impressive. It’s the irregularity of the buildings that gives Colmar such appeal. I mean, you can put a half-timbered house up just about anywhere – we have them in English Village just over the hill from where I live – but those aren’t fooling anybody. They’re far too perfect.

In Colmar, it’s as if the local builders had a short supply of plumb lines and levels. Right angles were suggestions, best to be ignored. Why measure when you can eyeball? Preferably after several glasses of wine. It gives the town a cartoonish, fairy-tale style, like a child’s drawing before he’s mastered size and perspective. Seussian, perhaps. Their collective rejection of a foolish consistency, that hobgoblin of little minds, is refreshing. 

Anyway, eventually Le Marechal had our rooms ready, with our luggage already brought up: a good thing, too, because we were on the 3rd and 4th floors, and the elevator was nearly useless in this case. It stopped at the 3rd floor, sure, but in an annex, and you had to go up and down a floor to get to our side. And then up to the fourth. The staircases were narrow and uneven (Seussian, again) and carrying luggage up those would have been a sweaty hour with a possible serious injury. 

Once there…our ‘family’ room had ample space for the four of us, plus an air conditioning unit, a rare treat in an old building. On the debit side: the room had two…bathrooms? I’m not sure they both met that definition. One side had a room with a bath, to be sure, and a sink – but no commode. I guess that’s still a “bath” room, though I’m not sure how a realtor would list it.

The other side had the commode, plus a sink and shower, crammed into a space that might not even be up to FAA code. The whole arrangement was, well (Cheers reference alert) 'Joycean'. Still, it was better than one WC with no tub.

We ran into a little bit of trouble for dinner – all the internet recommended places we ducked into were full. No room for the six of us. Yikes. We made a reservation for the next night at the most promising bistro, and kept wandering until we saw a dicey joint (Maison Rouge) that had sidewalk tables out front. What the hey, we were beggars.

And it was delightful! Not gourmet, but they specialized in a ham-on-a-spit deal that was tasty, and the boy’s flatbread served them well. In fact, we set the boys up at the end of the table, and for once they didn’t bug us for electronics, but had their own private dinner conversation about who knows what. 

We adults drank red, white, and rosé ,and enjoyed ourselves.