12th April 2017. Luxembourg & Saint Hubert, Belgium.
I missed the sunrise this morning but saw the mist hanging over the valley below us and an enormous barge travelling along the river in the far distance so that was worth going outside for. When I came back inside my wonderful husband had made coffee and was busy cooking fried eggs on toast, my favourite breakfast! What a GREAT start to the day.
We left reasonably early to start our journey. We had three towns in Luxembourg programmed into the SAT NAV. The first town we’d programme in was called Esch-Sure. Of course our SAT NAV thought it would be fun to take us through the city of Luxembourg when it really didn’t need to but it was very nice to see it as Darren squeezed his way through various roadworks.
We saw lots of colourful buildings as we drove through Luxembourg, bright yellow, purple, orange, mustard, terracotta, rose pink, green.
We arrived at Esch-Sure but the first thing we saw was a car park with a sign saying No Motorhomes. Not a good start, we carried on along the road that ran along the bottom of the town and through a tunnel, we thought that was the end of our decision to visit Esch-Sure but as we exited the tunnel we saw a bus bay and then a couple of other large bays marked out along the side of the road so we took a chance and parked there then walked back through the tunnel.
It was a very small town, we began our visit at a cafe where our original idea to have a coffee turned into a Belgium beer when we noticed that most of the people in there had glasses of beer.
We ordered some food to go with it, we weren’t really sure what the menu said but I knew Croque Monsieur was cheese and ham on toast so I ordered it without the ham, Darren picked something unknown off the menu which turned out to be a huge sausage in a box, then we noticed someone with chips, so we ordered some of those to help soak up the beer (9% it turned out) and two coffees.
Obviously that couldn’t happen without a saga, there were frites and there were chips written one underneath the other on the menu so we assumed that frites were French Fries and chips were thick like British ones. The waitress didn’t speak any English so she kindly tootled off into the cafe where she picked up an packet of crisps to show us. We hadn’t realised that it wasn’t just South Africans that called them chips but now we know.
Once we’d finished our unhealthy but very tasty meal we went off to explore the town, unfortunately that meant a steep walk uphill but it was well worth it.
There were the ruins of a castle at the top and we spent ages clambering around and taking photos of the castle and the surrounding views. We discovered from our raised viewpoint that there was a river running along on both sides of the tunnel.
I could have stayed up there for hours but we needed to travel on to the next two towns, Wiltz and Clervaux
When we got to both towns it was impossible to park so we did a drive by, they both looked pretty but not as nice as Esch-Sure.
We’d been stuck in roadworks throughout the journey which had eaten up a lot of time, it seems that currently Luxembourg is one big set of roadworks, everywhere we went someone was digging up a road or maybe that’s a just National pastime, having said that the roads were in tip top condition.
We left Luxembourg and drove to an aire near the Musees du Fourneau Saint-Michel near Saint Hubert in Belgium. It was a lovely stop in a forest.
We wandered up to a pub where we had coffee and a very nice crêpe with chocolate ice cream and most importantly a mini Easter egg, then we walked round the lake, it was very strange, as we walked along the path creatures, lurking under the water, suddenly shot away from the bank.
After our walk we sat beside the lake for ages trying to catch a glimpse of the things that had raced away from us, we think they must have been fish because every so often a bit further out in the lake a dorsal fin would break the surface.
We went back to the van as the sun was starting to set and settled down to watch some more episodes of Castle.