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Our Castle Road Trip: section 3 --- the photos that correspond to the text are numbered etc. through to
(grab something to eat, sit down and relax --- there’s a bit of reading ahead)
Saturday:
Saturday for us began at 8am , and our next adventures would take us along the Mosel River . We followed the winding river road on our castle hopping journeys until we came to Burg Eltz . We parked the car and started the trek towards the castle --- the first part of the road seemed nice and easy , a slowly descending road through the country side, then turning the corner we got a beautiful view of this magnificent castle, meanwhile forgetting to take in the steep descent ahead of us… that was fine, we just didn’t think of the return journey to the car. We made it down the hill , paid our entry fee and waited for a guided tour (our only option by which to see the castle). After a 45 minute wait , watching French tourists jump the line because there was 39 of them and German tour groups, an English tour was finally
arranged and we got shown around the castle . This castle was built to house three families - three brothers - and took just over 150 years to completely finish, each house taking 50 years to build. This was one of the very few castles in Germany that has not been ruined through attack over the years due to the families strong alliances. Until today the Eltz family (some 800 years later) still own the castle and have opened it up to tourists.
After seeing this castle from both inside and out and from down the hill, we made the mammoth journey back up the hill to our car. And rested here before hopping off to our next castle. Our next destination and final castle was in Cochem . Reichsburg as we saw it was nestled on top of a mountain over looking the Mosel River . We were determined not to walk up to this castle after the first castle, and being told that we had to walk from the town (Cochem) up to the castle , we set off in our car to find a residential street up the mountain… and we found a car
[03] Drive Thru Castle
would you like fries with that? park about 2 thirds of the way up the mountain, that saved us a lot of walking!
This castle was also very commercialised and very busy. We purchased our tickets and went on a German guided tour through the castle . Upon seeing this castle we continued our drive along the Mosel River .
We followed the river to Trier , which is on the border between Germany and Luxembourg.
As is was nearing night time, and we were both exhausted we casually looked around Trier, looking at the Palace , the entrance gate to the city and the Roman Baths .
From here we did our first border crossing by car to Luxembourg and found a place to stay the night, after some long searching which took us until 2am.
Sunday:
After a good night sleep we awoke at 9am and looked around Luxembourg for the day , we went to the tourism office, got our passports stamped, and decided to do a self guided tourism walk through the city.
We stopped of at all the major sites, taking photos
and looking around.
We also visited the Natural History and Arts Museum where we discovered a lot about Luxembourg’s history back in the Roman days.
We continued from here on our walk around the city finding the old city wall and ruins . We also found another beautiful church to explore .
Hitting 4pm we decided to get going if we wanted to see Belgium in day light. So we sped up our tour and saw the final landmarks on our list . From here we set off once again, in our car for our second border crossing to Belgium , where we headed to Liege for dinner.
Little did we know the autobahn we had chosen was being upgraded and we had the pleasure of sitting in road works for the majority of the way. Finally reaching Liege, we discovered this wasn’t the greatest town to pick as a tourist destination, but we were hungry, tired and against the clock, so we parked the car and went on foot in search of food.
After finding a restaurant and enjoying a hearty meal
we set off for our long journey home at approximately 9pm.
Our journey home, which was to take approx 5hrs ended up taking a little over 5 and half hours due to petrol stops et cetera, and we shared the driving and power naps.
Monday:
We arrived back in Bremen at 2.30am, clearing out the car and going straight to bed.
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