Day 17: Luxembourg: An Old Friend With a New Look

I've been to Vianden a few times and I've always had a pretty good time. I've visited the castle twice before, and, while it's a little castle, it's very well restored and always interesting too look at.

This time there was a festival going on, so it was a bit more lively than usual, for better or for worse.

Let me back up a bit though. We started off the afternoon by driving up through Ettelbrück and Brandenbourg, through the rolling hills and gentle mountains. I love the northern part of Luxembourg for its simple beauty and great views. We stopped a bit to walk up to the castle in Brandenbourg, although we didn't go inside. I noticed a lot of cars parked around with the license place that said NL, which is the Netherlands. According to Charel, lots of them come to northern Luxembourg to camp and see the scenery. I think I saw more of them then I did cars from Luxembourg.

After viewing the castle and taking some pictures, we next went to a reservoir on top of one of the tallest mountains in Europe. I probably mentioned this before, but this reservoir is used to make electricity. They produce the electricity in the night-time, when it costs more, and then during the day they pump the water back up to start the cycle all over again.





After this, we went to Vianden itself. We managed to park not quite so far from the castle, which was kind of a miracle considering how many people were there. The place was packed. There were merchant stalls everywhere inside the walls in the courtyard, in the first couple of rooms, and scattered in the display rooms throughout the castle. It made it pretty difficult to just tour the thing, though I imagine that the castle got lots of business that day. There was a sort of staged fight going on in one of the larger areas, and the crush of people was so bad that it was nearly impossible to get through. It was pretty annoying at times, although a few of the stalls had some very interesting hand-made stuff for sale. Most of it was just tourist junk, though.

After fighting our way through the castle tour, we decided to walk down to the town itself, which is down a very, very large hill. I didn't time it, but it takes about 15 minutes to walk all the way down. My knees were protesting by the time we reached the bottom.

The skylift was still open, so we decided to give that a try. I had never done that before, so that was a new thing that I was happy about. It gives a great view of the town, the castle, and the surrounding area. There is a restaurant at the top that they pretty much shuffle you through, but as we had already made a reservation at our usual place, we didn't stop there to eat.

We ate supper at the Victor Hugo hotel, which is one of our favorite places. I got the trout this time, which is one of the best things that I've had there. The only downside was a lot of bones, but I've had a bit more practice at removing them since I've moved to Europe, so I guess it wasn't too bad.

We drove home and went to bed early, preparing for our long day on Thursday.