Luxembourg: our fourth country in four days and the last new country of the trip. After today we re-tread old ground, passing into Germany tomorrow, returning to Enschede for the final of the football tournament on Sunday afternoon, taking our last sleep on the continent in Antwerp, Belgium on Sunday night before getting the Eurotunnel back to England on Monday.
When I think of Luxembourg, I think of fairy-tale castles nestled in the mountains, surrounded by evergreens and commanding vistas of a sun-drenched valley with maybe a little village at the bottom, much like the Hogwarts/Minas Tirith hybrid we encountered at Hohenzollern on the way to Stuttgart. Luxembourg city isn't quite like that, of course. It's a modern metropolis with all the usual trappings; shopping plazas, so-called nightlife, traffic, tourists, what I'm now beginning to think of as the obligatory red-light district, multi-national chain stores so you could be pretty much anywhere in the world, hotels, conference centres etc. etc. etc.
The aldstadt - or old town - where we are staying, actually is a bit more like my Schloss-in-the-forested-valley vision. It sits on either side of a shallow, narrow valley which clearly did used to be heavily tree-lined and does indeed feature a number of smaller dwellings at the bottom, though because it's so small, they climb the valley walls and from a certain angle, you're back in Lord of the Rings territory - gazing down on the Elves' home at Rivendell - perhaps unsurprisingly as we are only just over the border from Burg Hohenzollern and this whole region is where some of the properly ancient fairy tales that inspire fantasy writers came from.
Connecting the two parts of the aldstadt (and responsible for the vantage point that made me see Rivendell in the Péitrusse valley) is the Adolphe bridge, also known as the new bridge, despite being 114 years old; an impressive sight at 502 feet long, 138 feet above the valley floor and built from a local sandstone - as is most of the aldstadt. The light-coloured masonry gives the whole thing a regal air and ramps the wow factor up just a little.
A random wander over the bridge and around the new town led us into a residential area which also contained most of Luxembourg's government offices. Flats and the finance ministry seem odd bedfellows but I think you'll find both on the same street. All the ministries are in the same area, surrounded by Brazilian restaurants and tattoo parlours.
We came to Luxembourg pretty much on a whim. We were planning the trip and we'd sorted which football matches we'd attend and we had this two-day gap between games. Well, we'd already established that there didn't seem much to see in the Netherlands (we thought we'd have got a better look at Amsterdam than we actually did, otherwise we might have gone there) and we thought, why not?
Looking into it today, I discovered that Luxembourg is actually the perfect place to end the trip.* The people of Luxembourg have an attitude towards borders that regular readers here might recognise; a Luxembourg passport will get you into 172 countries without the need for a visa, this tiny nation is a founding member of the EU, they've been part of alliances with all four of the countries that border them for centuries and it was in Schengen, Luxembourg that the eponymous Schengen agreement was signed, without which this trip would have been a complete pain in the arse, probably twice as expensive and full of needless bureaucracy.
Thank you, Luxembourg.
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*Yes, I know we've got three days left. I'm doing a thing here, alright? Don't come in here with your facts and spoil it. The last few days are pretty much just the homeward journey, OK?
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