5/7 to Echternach
Jeff & I trot the same path only a little faster this morning. Precise Luxembourg wants us checked out at exactly 1030 - early!
Programmed for Echternach only 50 minutes NE, we find a wonderful free park next to a central lake with the usual surrounding green space, playgrounds, cycling & running paths. Beneath a small tree we hang loose, finish off some school work & read before we case the joint by velo.
We’re keen to ‘discover’ the character of L/bourg. Why doesn’t the whole world want to live here? It’s cheap, accommodates travelers well, has fine facilities, great groceries, marvelous art, magnificent cycling & hiking, is at the centre of historical Europe and is full of educated people with a high standard of living. So far we’ve observed they like to paint their houses pastel colours especially pink, are quite particular and are the only place in Europe so far that wear bike helmets. Usually this is our tourist stamp.
At the centre of Echternach is L/bourg’s most important religious building, St Willibrord’s abbey. He was a monk from Northumbria (UK) who brought Christianity to the Nederlands and L/bourg in 689AD. After wars & fires, only the small original crypt remains wherein lies the Saint’s stone coffin. Around it a marvelous basilica has been built from gorgeous gold & rust coloured local stone. Both the abbey and the annual Whit Tuesday dance procession to venerate the town’s founding father have world heritage listing.
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| square alternates with round |
Rimming several interlinking squares bustling with people licking ice-creams & buskers on violin are wonderful old churches, sections of the rampart walls, town halls, banks, cafes and shops.
My favourite is the beautiful old, pink stone law courts built in the 1500s with it’s delicate statues, turrets & wonderful crinkly windows. Flush with information about tomorrow’s hike and Friday’s cycle trek along the Sure river, our tour is complete with an ice-cream and a trip to the lakeside playground.
Around our small dinner table the family delights in my recent purchase of a gooey caramelized caramel spread mistaken for peanut butter! Prior to this Jeff saw stars when I bought 2L of thick creamy vanilla custard thinking it was vanilla yoghurt! Just as well we thrash it on the bikes most days!
The kids giggle their way through the last part of last night’s movie and we acknowledge another day in paradise before lights out.
6/7
Wilsen here.
Prepare yourself for a full-on, unadulterated, shockingly awesome description of today.
This is NOT for the faint hearted.
I just wrote that for the dramatic appearance. I want to be an actor someday.
We woke up to a good breakfast, perfectly energizing for the day of hiking. We all put on our hiking boots, got our bikes and helmets out and set off. We rode our bikes to the bus station where our walk started and tied them to a pole.
We checked the map, got our bearings and started our 11.7 kilometre walk by trudging up a hill with heaps of road works.
We saw the little painted E1 signs indicating where we were to go and ended up plunging into the forest. We walked along a possible roman aqueduct for a little bit but ended up peeling off it.
We eventually burst through into a rocky area, littered with gigantic boulders. They loomed high into the sky, owning the land they are on, their control once with iron fist, now nature and life claims them.
We sat on one to eat a morning nibbly of stroep (look at the entries for Holland, I think mum mentioned stroepwaffels? if not google them), a type of caramel mum bought thinking it was peanut butter - best mistake she ever made!
These boulders have a good use for us mischievous kids. They provide good hiding places from which we can jump out and say boo, scaring the parents out of their skin.
Yeah yeah, I look retarded. That’s me. Anyway, of the typical teenage concern about looks and back onto the day. We then proceeded to wind our way through a bit where the path got a little bit…...unclear.
On our way we discovered this killer orange slug (probably from Holland.)
Crossed man’s first form of bridge
And we explored this slightly strange cave.
We had a great lunch of sausage , capsicum , cheese and olive paste on bread. That bad grammar was intentional, besides, I am Australian.
Kel and I sat on the ground writing notes to the parents follwing up behind in the soil .
We slowly made our way to a look out from which we could see Echternach, home base.
As we neared the end of the walk, we somehow got back onto another little aqueducty thing.
We did a twist, then a turn, a hop, a jump, a pirouette and a stumble to end back on the part of the track we started on, which shouldn’t be, since the track is a loop. We gave up trying to figure it out and just walked back toward town. Half an hour later, we are back on our bikes and riding home. We saw this kind of crazy and… kooky garden amongst the vege patches, and stopped to take a photo.
After we got home, Mum and Dad had a coffee. Then Dad and I went to the BMX park. Dad raced me around a track which had HEAPS of berms (um… how to describe it… berms are parts of the track where it turns over 90 degrees that elevate and turn on their side, so you go shooting around them parallel to the ground), I went shooting skywards over hilly things,
I also got really scared when my feet left the pedals.
We headed back the long way around the lake.
Dad and I settled down in the chairs outside to read our books for a bit, but it rained so we had to go back inside.
Mum’s gone for a run, now I am writing the blog entry, if you want to see it read back a bit (hee hee, paradox). I am done now, time to get up and get into my PJs so I can read (again).
Tuna salad dinner with “sticks” and Trappist Beer #3 to sample - Westmalle - a little beery, not as dark as the Orval or Rochefort.
Parents watch an episode of Band of Brothers on their computer. The episode is about the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes which is where we are!
7/7
Soft rain fell all night freshening things up for a sun-shiney day. The town is buzzing with preparations for a weekend triathlon centred around our lake.
The kids work on geometry & shapes in maths and then off we go on some of the country’s 600km of bike paths.
With no real destination, we go north along the banks of the Sure, criss-crossing pretty bridges to Germany & back,
amusing ourselves each time with whoops & exclamations and singing out greetings to many other leisure cyclists & walkers. Simple sobering memorials stand quietly & eerily on the grassy banks commemorating different parts of the Battle of Ardennes & the many involved battalions. Some 80,000 Americans & 100,000 Germans lost their lives. As we enjoy a snack on a German bench, Jeff and I watch groups of happy holiday-makers kayaking downstream and find it hard to imagine the WW2 bloodshed in the forested backdrop.
En route, Kel meets a fairy called Claudia and Wil imagines designing a European coffee menu for our Castile St guests, complete with accompanying coffee chocolates, coffee cakes, coffee nougats & biscuits, that he’ll service.
42 kms later we’re back in beautiful, vibrant Echternach for a well deserved ice-cream. Making for Ed, a “Specialized” bike shop seduces the boys. Jeff buys a cool iPod handle bar mounting device for navigation...as well as more puncture kit items. Wil is churning through tubes as he throws his bike around practicing BMX skills (and the rims are cheap rubbish). Having our bikes allows us to circle towns and see people’s homes & vege patches, often in really pretty surrounding suburbs.
Back home, the kids do their writing - a book review for Wil and they each write a cinquain poem. Kel & I make house & dinner whilst Wil drags Jeff off to the thrills of the lakeside BMX track threatening to kick butt.
Then, while the kids return to the playground with the flying fox the parents sit out under the tree watching the triathletes with their incredible bikes and butts pass by, sampling Trappist beer number 4 - Achel - pale, a little fruity, very refreshing, and not too beery - noice!
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