While Paris is all the glam, smaller French towns like Strasbourg, Colmar, and Metz in the Northeast’s Alsace-Lorraine area offer all the charm, as we found during a mother-daughter weekend trip from our home base in Luxembourg City.

We were greeted by our Airbnb host, Jeanne, a local and a retired professor of Irish history and English linguistics, who escorted us past the jewelers shop up a tiny elevator six flights to our Airbnb – the space just below Jeanne’s penthouse apartment on the popular pedestrian shopping street Rue de Noviembre. Then we promptly set out to explore the town.

The storybook streets of Strasbourg demand a stroll through the cobblestone and canal-lined streets of the ‘La Petite France‘ neighborhood. Consider passing on anything that requires a ticket to enter. Also consider holding back the urge to hop on a canal boat in Strasbourg, opting instead for the smaller boats and canals, only a few minutes away, in the fairytale village of Colmar’s ‘Little Venice.‘