Colmar, France

I’m pretty sure Colmar, France makes many top 10 lists for the cutest small town in Europe. It’s just adorable, with a small canal running down the center of old town — called “Little Venice” of course — with half-timbered buildings galore, picturesque pedestrian bridges covered in flowers and heart locks, carefully decorated building facades, and of course, a million and one insta-tourists flocking to the same spot trying to capture their own unique image, exactly like everyone else. (Okay, Colmar wasn’t nearly as bad in this respect as Grindewald, but there were still a few of them around.)

Since Colmar has been on my list of top places to visit for a long time (along with Rothenburg and Heidelberg, because I adore a small, cute town), we drove down for Labor Day weekend with the dogs. While many guide books and friends assured us we could do all of Colmar in a day, we booked all three days in one hotel in old town Colmar, since dealing with the puppies adds another layer of complicated scheduling. A few days before our trip, I double checked our itinerary, only to discover I had accidentally cancelled our hotel in Colmar when I was trying to cancel a hotel we had scheduled in Trier for a trip I decided to change. Luckily, we were able to book the exact same hotel in Colmar again and it was $20 cheaper! Unfortunately, we lost our hotel parking due to the mix-up, but we lucked out when we arrived and found a relatively inexpensive pay lot near our hotel that we were able to park in all weekend.

Colmar is in a region of France known as Alsace, which is on the border of Germany, and historically has switched hands between Germany and France a few times. At this point it’s firmly a French region, but while the German influence is strong, the French influence wins out for certain things, like electronic payments for everything and a more refined food pallet.

In Germany, cash is still king and many places, including some fancy restaurants, simply don’t take cards. We have been told that it’s gotten better since COVID, but many German restaurants and stores still prefer cash, especially for smaller purchases. In Colmar though, literally everyone, including street festival vendors, took electric payment via phone or card, and they didn’t blink at card payments, even for the smallest purchases like a single scoop ice cream cone. Since we have been in Germany I have gotten used to carrying a lot of cash, including a robust change purse since the dollar and two dollar euro equivalent are coins, but it was nice to just forget about trying to find the right change and just hold my phone to a reader instead.

As for the food, Alsacation food is basically German food, except it tastes really good. Take all the classic German dishes — pork knuckle, würst, steak, and roast chicken — and then have French chefs do the cooking, and the food goes from merely okay, to absolutely outstanding. It’s amazing what a few kilometers, an international border, and a completely different perspective on food will do to change a menu. I don’t want to hate on German food too much — it tastes good and I generally like it, but it gets repetitive really fast, so the French version was a nice change, especially considering all the highly rated restaurants in the area.

One of the apps I downloaded before we arrived in Germany was the Michelin Star app for restaurants and hotels. There are a couple of places in Wiesbaden and Frankfurt we want to check out, but Colmar and the surrounding villages easily had a dozen choices. We made reservations for the first place we ate, but we should have made reservations throughout the weekend because restaurants filled up quickly for dinner. On the other hand, we were still able to walk into a Michelin starred restaurant next door to our hotel for lunch one day, so it wasn’t a complete loss.

I was also pretty thrilled to discover that France, unlike Germany, has embraced the IPA. Don’t get me wrong, I can find decent German IPAs in the bottle, like Maisel, Brew Crew, and the poorly named Insel Brewing (it means island in German, so it’s only the English version that is questionable), in quite a few places, but the only place I have found IPA on tap in Germany has been the Scottish restaurant Brew Dog in downtown Wiesbaden. In Colmar, most of the restaurants and bars had at least one IPA option, which was definitely a nice surprise.

Overall, Colmar lived up to our expectations. It was extremely pretty, with a few interesting buildings and historic sites to visit, while still being small enough to be easy to navigate on foot. It also had a ton of stork decorations on various buildings and stork memorabilia in all the tourist shops, since the Alsace region has been a stork summer destination for centuries (seriously— one of the first mentions of storks in the region was from the year 817) and most locals consider them good luck. We also have a warm spot for storks since our stay in Schierstein and watching the local Schierstein brood in the nest in our friend’s courtyard, so we definitely took advantage of the stork-themed pottery and doodads when we were looking for souvenirs from the trip.