Visit the photo set Cologne on Flickr.
Robin and I decided at the last minute to take a long weekend trip out of town. We both needed to relax and felt that getting away from the house and computers was a good idea. I had been in Cologne, Germany in September and felt it would be a good place to travel to; not too far away but different enough from Amsterdam.
We took the Friday mid-morning ICE train, which only takes about 2.5 hours, putting us in Cologne in the early afternoon. We rolled the dice and tried to check into our hotel, the Linder Hotel Dom Residence, before the official check-in time. Fortunately for us, they had a room open and we dropped our bags off before setting out to investigate the town.
We started by visiting the Cologner Dom, Germany’s most important Gothic church. It is a massive building and beautiful both in and out. We then walked around the main shopping area and the old part of town, before doing a little reconnaissance for the next day’s plans. We walked across the Hohenzollern Bridge and quickly noticed the thousands of love locks left locked to the fence on the bridge. It was pretty impressive and I understand from the article that is a very recent tradition.
On Saturday, we had only one thing planned: the Claudius Therme, one of Germany’s thermal spas. It is essentially a water park for adults with a variety of pools, steam baths, plunge pools and the like. A number of the pools are outside so we were able to enjoy the cool fall air from within a very warm pool. The spa has a restaurant as well and we enjoyed a nice hot spinach salad. All in all, we spent close to 6 blissful hours at the spa; I came away the most relaxed I have been in a long time.
We wanted a traditional German dinner, so we walked back to the old town from the hotel and by accident came across the Brauhaus Sion. We ended up sharing a table in this busy place, and had a dinner of sauerbraten, potato dumplings and apple sauce, washed down with several cold Sion Koelsch beer. Tasty and fast. We returned to the hotel and had another beer/wine in the hotel bar before turning in for the evening.
On Sunday morning, we rose, had breakfast and hit the Museum Ludwig, a great art museum with a fine collection of modern art. The Picasso and pop-art collections were great. We also had a nice lunch at the cafe in the museum, a very nice tomato soup for me and a ciabatta with goat’s cheese and honey for Robin.
All too soon, we had to head out to the train station for our trip home. A very relaxing weekend and a needed one.
