Switzerland 2025 - Colmar, France and Chateau du Haut-Koenigsbourg

We had visited Colmar once before as a day trip from our Rhine River cruise in 2013 and decided to take a trip over the border to France to visit this lovely city once again. We stayed in a historic hotel, part of the Relais and Chateaux group, called La Maison des Tetes which literally means the house of heads. Now you may be envisioning some scary place but the "heads" are just sculpted heads decorating the front of the building. Every day the city walking tours would stop to admire the hotel facade. The hotel is located in the pedestrian zone and near all the historic sites including "Little Venice". Since we had previously visited the Unterlinden museum with the famous Isenheim altarpiece as well as other sites, we just wandered the streets looking in shop windows, strolled through Little Venice and the covered marketplace. The one thing we didn't do was to visit the Bartholdi museum and I'm a bit sorry we didn't see it. The weather was rainy and cold and I was glad to find a Starbucks nearby for a nice hot latte. We drove from Colmar to visit the Chateau du Haut-Koenigsbourg the next day. It had been raining earlier and we actually drove up into the clouds surrounding the castle. When we walked up to the castle entrance we couldn't see more than the gate in front of us due to the cloud cover hanging over the castle. We never let that kind of thing keep us from enjoying a visit and it actually was rather a cool atmospere. Once inside we saw a drawbridge, a tower staircase, lots of weaponry including several cannon, colorful wall murals, and lots of ceramic stoves. I always think these ceramic heating stoves were a great idea and how much warmth it would give the room, you just would have to be super careful that no one touched it! After our castle visit we returned to Colmar via country roads through vineyards, farmland, and small villages.