Cologne, Germany

We drove up to Cologne last month to see the magnificent cathedral and several of the markets. If you go in December, we’d recommend taking the train, as the entire area near the cathedral is blocked off to vehicles. It took us nearly 3 hours from Kaiserslautern due to the heavy traffic once we got off the Autobahn near Cologne. The train time had originally been equal to drive time, not including traffic delays.

The church is beautiful. The surrounding areas were quite crowded, but we’re glad for the chance to see it and parts of the city. In my opinion, it is worth an overnight if you’d like to see a concert or a show (we just did a day trip). There are river cruises in warmer weather as well.

Much of the markets were the usual suspects of vendors, but we have three shops to recommend: the cathedral gift shop (just outside the actual church building) has neat greeting cards with delicate paper cut-outs of the cityscape. One vendor at the market directly next to the church sold coffee cups with black cats painted on them, along with names of cats- and customizable!

The market furthest away from the cathedral that we walked to was a couple of blocks beyond the crowded shopping streets. The market itself was also wall to wall people, but we really liked a vendor selling foot-high carved wood trees with matching colored ornaments already hung and included. The trees were painted in various colors. There is surely much more to see in Cologne, but we were ready to head home after dinner and a short stroll along the river promenade.