Monday, September 19, 2022

Country Counting

For our next stop on Marie's Very Brief Tour of Belgium and Friends, I flew from Heathrow to Luxembourg City for a day of sightseeing. As I'd just told Peter Moore on Saturday, "I'm unlikely to get to Luxembourg by accident, so I thought I'd better make it intentional."

That probably made more sense to Peter, who is a travel writer and podcaster who I think has visited more countries and written more travel books than I have. But for context, the way we both travel ideally involves a route over several countries in a region, or possibly the world, and so there are times we just kind of end up somewhere we never considered visiting on its own.

Luxembourg. What are the odds?

Slim. But some Italian friends of mine had posted photos of Luxembourg recently, and it looked lovely, so I added it onto my Belgium trip.

I caught the public bus (free) from the airport to the train station, stored my luggage, and took a tram to the historic center. I'd been completely confused when reading about Luxembourg but the references to the high town and the gorge, but now it all made sense. Part of the city was a scenic deep cut, and people live both up top and down below in the gorge. It sure was pretty but kind of cold.

There is a casement tour you can usually do where you go to underground tunnels, but it's closed. There's an alternative sight, but that was sold out.

Once I got done with my Luxembourg sightseeing, I had lunch, caught the tram back to the train station, fetched my luggage, and got on the first of three trains that would take me to Bruges.