Haut-Kœnigsbourg

by Arthur Dent

"Wait, are you going to France again?!" - words of wisdom floating past by outside parties while planning todays trips. And indeed, this was the case. The only part of the plan which was more in question was whether we really wanted to go on another hike and play chicken with the threatening weather forecast. The weather certainly got a good head start, making us all take out our umbrellas.

Upon arrival to a neighbouring castles to our destination castle, we were a little surprised to be greeted by one parking lot after the other for this castle. They were certainly ready for another few thousand visitors. So we parked by ourselves in the closest parking lot, walked the rest of the way, and then got chased out again with: "closed!". Guess we should have taken a hint with those empty parking lots. The next castle was 100% more open.

Haut-Kœnigsbourg was also nice in that since the castle was mostly destroyed 100 years ago, what was reconstructed and put on display wasn't the pieces they managed to find destroyed in a corner with some glue, but put more of an effort into trying to remember what things would have looked like and found furinture to fit that image. We were also rather happy to have gotten out of the castle again, just in time for the hordes of screaming school kids to walk up to the gate.

Colmar also got a visit and has some interesting properties.

  1. Even though it's a little ways from the german border, you hear more german than french or english to be heard on the street.
  2. It doesn't seem to matter which alleyway you go down, there will be a bunch of houses in intersting colours with funky designs and weird things sitting on the balcony. And at the end of this alley, there will always be another 5 further alleys for which these properties continue to hold.

In some ways, the initially miserable weather worked in our favour to stop other people joining in on some of the tourist traps that we walked into today. The forecast for tomorrow however looks worse again so … we'll see how far we go on the next set of plans.