Luxembourg

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We picked up a rental car (Peugeot 207) in Cologne and took the Autobahn south-west towards Luxembourg. For the 5 days we were driving around Luxembourg and Germany, we didn’t have any hotel reservations. Not having any reservations gave us some flexibility in this portion of our trip which was good because we were indecisive about exactly where we wanted to go.

We drove for a few hours and stopped in Echternach, a town just across the border from Germany. We looked at a couple of hotel rooms and chose the less smoky smelling one, the Hotel des Ardennes. We think we may have been the only people staying in the entire hotel that night and our room looked like it had its last renovations in 1972, but otherwise it was a pleasant stay. Echternach had an old abbey and a nice trail near the river.

We took a quick walk around Echternach and then got back into the car and drove to Luxembourg City, about 30 minutes away. The city is built around a steep river valley, which made it different from a lot of the other cities we’ve seen on our trip. There was a fortified castle, or ‘casemates’ built into one of the valley walls. We took a self guided tour through some of the castle-cave tunnels. It was fun to scramble around and there were nice views of the city from the tunnel openings.

We didn’t have time to do much else in Luxembourg City, but we visited the Notre Dame Cathedral back near the city center and we found a Chi Chi’s restaurant for dinner. I was pretty excited about that because we’ve really missed Mexican and Tex-Mex food. Lindsay thought I was silly for continuing my quest to find good Mexican food in Europe (still no luck yet, although this Chi Chi’s was the closest we’ve gotten this year.)

After dinner we headed back to Echternach and took a walk around a lake just outside of town. We also walked over a bridge that crossed back to Germany. It was about as exciting as crossing a state border in the US (no border control or anything), but we thought it was exciting to be able to walk to a different country.

- Jason

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Photos

Our ride
Another trusty Peugeot

Gas station in front of a very nice building
For some reason this seemed really weird to us

The Retrotel
aka The hotel room that time forgot. Too bad the avocado green bathroom's not in the picture.

Border crossing to Germany
We walked from our hotel in Echternach to Germany just because we could.