Sert Day 5

Hills, at last and rain.

Bastogne-Bourscheid-Remich

Distance: 90 Miles

The day started just on the other side of Bastogne town at the war memorial and Bastogne Historical Centre. Just as well it wasn't so far away as I had to leave Mrs VL behind for 15 minutes to give back the keys to the room in the B&B which we had managed to take with us...

Anyway, Bastogne is, of course, the location of the battle of the Bulge during which cut off and under supplied American troops fought back the advances of the Germans in a crucial battle of the 2nd world war.

We had to run from the most impresive Memorial into the Museum to escape the pouring rain, which slowly eased up during the day and stopped in the mid afternoon. The Museum was well worth the visit, although not quite on the scale of the Normandy Beaches Museums which I visited with Blogs Brother in Law and London Son some years back.

We drove back into the town as Mrs VL wanted some Belgian Chocolate for the Journey and I, obviously, wanted to take this last oppurtunity to stock up on some Belgian beer. Before long we were over the border into Luxembourg, and almost as quickly the landscape changed from flat to distinctly hilly.

Rather dissapointingly, we found out how easily the front brakes over heated on the way down the hill to past this view point (we drove back up just to have another go at it (well, to have a look at the view actually)). Our journey onwards took us over the dam in the picture.

One of our guides, Lonely Planets "Europe on a shoe string" mentioned the Magnificent 1000 Year old hill side castle of Chateau De Bourscheid , and when we finally found it it was indeed, Magnificent, 1000 years old and on the side of a steep hill. Affording fantastic views from the top of the watch house, as you can see...

After a quick Cup-a-Soup Lunch, we stopped to take the photo used on the worlds most expensive postcard (shown below for those that didn't recieve one (apologies, but by the time we'd got them printed, bought a special pen, bought envelopes, bought siscors because the envelopes were to small (or were the photos to big?), and paid the rediculous German postal cost, we couldn't afford any more...))

Onward, carefully, with the gearbox screaming (as it does) in third or second down the steepest hills we headed through the elegant Luxembourg City towards our final destination Remich, in Luxembourgs small wine region on the Mosel Valley.

Lonely Planet reccomended Hotel Auberge with the Resturant de Cygnes, specialising in wood fire baked Pizzas. The Pizza was very good, albeit consumed a little late in the evening after our walk round town during which we enjoyed some Pasta with some local White wine, saw some fantastic fruit trees and did a bit of a shop at the Local Supermarket. Finding out in the process that beer and whiskey were very cheap in Luxembourg so we scheduled a quick trip there in the morning with the car.