It's All in the Details

Yesterday, Sue and I headed over to the Alsace Wine Road for a visit to two of my favourite of the lesser known villages:  St.Hippolyte and Bergheim.  As we wandered around them, I wondered what makes these places just so charming. I know, I know!  There are the colourful half-timbered medieval buildings, the cobblestoned streets, the ubiquitous flowers, the little narrow alleyways and the storks nesting in the tops of many of the towers.  What isn't charming about all that?   But, it is something more; something I couldn't put my finger on. Then, as we looked at the houses more closely, I figured it out.  It is the whimsical little details everywhere you look that make everything so very special.  Whether it is little wooden shoes forming part of a balcony and the witch dolls hung from the eaves on houses on Bergheim, the brightly-coloured flowerpots on the stairs of a house in St. Hippolyte, or a flowerpot hat on a tree stump "head" peering over the fence of a garden in Rhinau, all these little details create a very unique personality which is quintessentially Alsace!