European Odyssey Day13

Our European Odyssey continues, but it is fast heading for its conclusion.  Two more days and we are headed home...  a great adventure.

Today finds us in Colmar, France, another medieval town, largely preserved, the majority of its buildings still intact after these hundreds of years.  It is also the home of Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, the designer of the Statue of Liberty. It took about 3 hours to get over here from Lindau.  We traveled through Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and France to get here.  I met a nice couple from the U.S. He was from West Virginia, she was from Pittsburgh.  The are ex-pats, living in Basel, Switzerland.  They heard me talking and just knew I was from the South.  They said it made them homesick.
Mostly spared from the destruction's of the French Revolution and the wars of 1870–1871, 1914–1918 and 1939–1945, the cityscape of old-town Colmar is homogeneous and renowned among tourists. An area that is crossed by canals of the river Lauch (which formerly served as the butcher's, tanner's and fishmonger's quarter) is now called "little Venice" (la Petite Venise). Colmar's cityscape (and neighbouring Riquewihr's) served for the design of the Japanese animated film Howl's Moving Castle.

Launch River, runs through town

Street Scene, Colmar

Lady Liberty

Colmar

Colmar, on the river

Launch River Bridge

Flowers on the Launch River Bridge

More flowere

Linda & Amanda fed the Swans at our dinner table

Monument to French wine

Liberty at night

The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World; French: La Liberté éclairant le monde) is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in the middle of New York Harbor, in Manhattan, New York City. The statue, designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and dedicated on October 28, 1886, was a gift to the United States from the people of France. The statue is of a robed female figure representing Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, who bears a torch and a tabula ansata (a tablet evoking the law) upon which is inscribed the date of the American Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. A broken chain lies at her feet. The statue is an icon of freedom and of the United States: a welcoming signal to immigrants arriving from abroad