France 2023 - Day 5 / Strasbourg & Colmar

Steps today : 25 981 / 17.13 km

Day tripping to Colmar today - the train station in Strasbourg always looks like an alien ship to me!

Colmar is about 30 minutes away by train, and then another 30-minute walk from the station to the old town, so we arrived around 9AM and in hindsight it was too early. 

It's a cute town, but it has a kind of "Disney" feel which I don't care for and at 9AM it was deserted. Everything was closed and the garbages were out waiting to be picked up. I felt like we were waiting for the amusement part to open.

I really don't have that much to say about the city. We walked around taking pictures of all the usual sights and eventually stopped for a coffee.  There was a lot of construction around the Big Church so we didn't wander around there.

We decided to visit the Bartholdi Museum which opened at 10. Easy to find thanks to handy directional markers all over town...  until we came across one that told us to split in two and do in opposite directions. ha ha ha ha  Maybe we should have tried!

The museum was interesting, it was 5€ and we stayed about an hour.

I enjoyed the section dedicated to the construction of the Statue of Liberty:

Not entirely sure what this is! If there was a plaque I missed it, but it sure is interesting!

By the time we were done with the museum, more tourists had descended on the city and it did make the atmosphere livelier, but we were more or less done. We searched for a place to have a drink and decided to head back to Strasbourg for lunch.

The search was exhausting, very few of the cafés were set up for drinks but we eventually found something....  not cute and with plastic cups.  Actually, they might not have been but it's the way I remember it. 

Back in Strasbourg by about 2PM we were off for a late lunch. We knew exactly where we wanted to go, my mom wanted wiener schnitzel so we had scanned some menus yesterday in preparation.

It was tasty, but unusually thick for a schnitzel - hard to tell in this picture...

After lunch, we did start to wander around, but it was so windy - which made it so cold - that we found refuge inside the fine arts museum. I especially enjoyed the Still Life paintings.

We had spotted the place where we wanted to have supper - I forget why now, but it was over an hour wait before it opened so we walked across the city, off the island and explored south.  There was really nothing to see and I didn't even take pictures.

After such a late and large lunch, supper was simple and small, "just" some foie gras and vendanges tardives

It was back to the hotel after this, not even a little room left for a nightcap.