Day 23 - Ghent to Luxembourg

Luxembourg

Jan 5th - Well, we are into the final days of the trip and have a couple of one night stays coming up between now & when we leave to return home :( We were up early to enjoy our last wonderful breakfast at Hotel Hancelot and then off to the train station for our next destination - Luxembourg. We had about a 1 hour lay over in Brussels between trains & Rob had carefully calculated that we had enough room and weight limit in our luggage for a few more bottles of Cantillon. Since the brewery was only about a 10 minute walk from the train station, I hunkered down with our bags & Rob made a run to pick up a few more souveniers :) Since it was a brew day at Cantillon, it was a busy spot & Jean Van Roy invited Rob to stick around to check things out...I'm just a wee bit shocked Rob didn't take him up on that & leave me waiting at the train station a while longer, but he resisted temptation and was back to the station well in time to catch the next train. 



Looking back up from the Grund



Loking down at buildings in the Grund





When we arrived in Luxembourg City, it was a torrential downpour and very windy - we didn't have too far to walk from the station to our hotel, so we got bundled up and made the trek getting absolutely soaked in the process. Our hotel is located above an Italian restaurant...definitely not the nicest or most comfortable accomodations we've seen on the trip, but it's just for the night so it will suffice.

Just about the time we checked in, got our packs off our backs, the rain stopped & the sun came out...perfect timing for setting off on foot to explore the capital city if this itty bitty country. I had to look up the stats to get them straight - Luxembourg is 998 square miles (about 51 miles long & 35 miles wide) and of the 194 independent countries of the world is 170th when ranked largest to smallest (I'm quoting wikipedia on these facts).
 

Funky vases outside a museum


What makes Luxembourg city beautiful is very different than any other city we've visited on this trip. Yes, it had beautiful old buildings - but here it's the landscape that is so unique & interesting. As we walked over the Adolphe bridge from the area of the city our hotel is in to the more touristy part of the city, we got our first glimpse down into one of the deep gorges. As we made it a bit further into the historical part of the city, the bridges, cliffs, gorges, and old buildings all along were stand-out stunning. We found the location of the elevator that takes you from the top of the city down to the river level of the valley to do a walking tour of the area called the Grund (the area in the valley below the city).

After touring the Grund & taking the elevator back to the top again, the skies had opened up again with another good downpour. We took cover for a while by a building that had some outdoor covering. We waited and waited but it didn't seem to be letting up...so we decided to go back down to the Grund level where we had seen a pub by the river, not too far from the elevator to warm up, have a beer, and wait out the rain. We were chatting with the bartender who told us that they have been getting an unual amount of rain in the past weeks...and the river outside the window that we had thought must be at a high level he told us had been about a meter higher, yikes!

There's a building in that cliff!

It only took one beer for the rain to let up again, so we were able to walk back to our hotel without getting drenched again. We knew we were hitting the road (or should I say rails) again in the morning, so we chilled out in the room for a bit & researched a spot close to the hotel for a bite to eat. We found a Greek restaurant with great reviews - hey, when in Luxembourg...eat Greek?!...why not :) We were not disappointed...once translating the Greek menu items that were in French, what we ended up ordering was probably some of the best Greek food we've ever had.

Pretty stained glass of Luxembourg in the train station

New Beers for the day: Mythos (hey, we were in a Greek restaurant), other then that were repeaters :)