Luxembourg: A European Cocktail?

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Well it didn´t take us long to make our way through Luxembourg, being that it is smaller than the smallest US state. As we experienced Luxembourg City and the beautiful countryside, we were intruiged by the mixture of French and German language and culture. What language do they speak here? While sitting on a bus we saw three: most of the ads were in French, all of the signs telling you to 'be good!' were in German, and the "Bus Stop" sign was a mysterious hybrid. In fact, the official language is Luxembourgish as well as French and German. Now, I (Sara) learned French in High School and some German in College. I suck at both, but if I could speak with a mixture of whatever word, French or German, comes to mind first, I could hold a decent conversation. Well aparently this is the place for me. They start a sentence in French and end in German...I think.

Here´s a recap of our Luxembourg experience:

Luxembourg City:

We were so enamoured by the city´s beaty as we arrived by train, that we decided to spend a full rest/sight-seeing day there. A free tourist pamphlet encouraged us to visit the Casemates. We saw the words "archeological crypt" next to it and thought, "Cool!".

The Casemates is a fortified castle built in 963 which would become the "Cradle of the City." When we arrived at the location, we were standing on an old ramp that we had ridden over it the night before on our way to the hostel. Was it under us? We walked over to an information niche and found some stairs going down. Voila! There was a ticket booth and a turnstyle down there. We were led through a series of halls and rooms carved out of the rock with windows for cannons. Extremely narrow spiral staircases seemed to tunnel deep into the rock forever, leading to smaller spaces...without light. I don´t think we were supposed to go into the dark, scary spaces, but Paul brought a headlamp. Oh boy. He seemed really interested in all the smallest and smelliest crawl spaces. (We found poop, twice.) I, however, became more and more interested as we climbed up to the more well light and wide open spaces.

Riding through Luxembourg

Riding through Luxembourg was lovely, for the most part. We had two route options through the country: follow the bike route indicated on our map, or follow the route described in our guidebook, 'Europe by bike' . We decided to trust the people who wrote our guidebook. And the first they told us to do as we exited Luxembourg city was to follow a busy highway. We went with it. Yes, 5 miles uphill with zero shoulder and large trucks gave much credibility to those guidebook writers. But they redeemed themselves soonafter. We followed a quiet, windy road along a babbling creek. It was all relaxing gradual downhill in the cool shade of the forest. And as if it couldn´t get any better, we started passing beautiful rock formations. We stopped at a turnout to pee, and there stood a picnick table beneath a roofed clif. We immediately started seeing lines, or potential rock climbing routes under this roof. I spotted a rad traverse right in front of where I was relieving myself and called Paul over (after I was finished). We spent a while climbing around and dreaming about returning to Luxembourg to develop some climbing routes. There were so many beautiful walls along this creek.

The creek flowed into the Mosel river and we made it into Germany that evening. Thus began our River tour of Europe. We will be following major rivers from here on...

Our short stay Luxembourg was very enjoyable. The ride was (usually) peaceful and the cocktail of languages was funny, if not a bit confusing at times.

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Photos

The Casemates
Sara checks out the view from the upper level of the Casemates.

The Casemates Floor
Paul walks over the beautifully weathered floors.

A Deep Well
Scary!

Cliffs Along the Creek
We rest under a rock roof.

Climbing Around
Sara tests the rock. There is so much potential here.