July 30 - Day 17 - Random stuff... and Castles!!

Wednesday started out lazy and quiet. We spent some time trying to get caught up on blogs and pictures.

I've been thinking about some of the "lessons learned" from this trip. I think the main ones are:

• This was our first trip to Europe and we tried to cram as much stuff as possible into it, but it would have been better to do less days and less activities and allow some better quality time for some things. When we come back, we will keep that in mind.
• If I was (physically) preparing for this all over again I would walk more miles and definitely do more stairs.
• If you need a washcloth in Europe, bring one from home. They don't have them, even in the hotels (they do have very nice towels). Strange what we take for granted...
• If we would have taken an "official" tour of Europe we probably would have walked less, but not seen nearly as much. We are grateful for our personal tour-guide (son-in-law) and the time he has taken to show us Europe.
• We take drinking water for granted. In Europe, if you want water, you have to ask for it, and, 98% of the time, pay for it.

After lunch we headed out on a road trip to the northern part of Luxembourg. What a beautiful country!!

 

We stopped to look at a reservoir that is part of a power system. They fill the reservoir by pumping water up from the river during the day, and then let the water back out at night to generate power. In the second picture you can see both the reservoir on top and the river below.

We saw several castles. The third one was in Vianden, where we stopped for a while and walked around inside.

Pictures from inside the Vianden castle.

The view of the town of Vianden from the castle.

After we got done at the castle, we walked down the road (and down, and down...) to the town, and then took a skylift up the hill and back down. Here is the town and the castle from the skylift.

The view coming back down.

We ate supper at a restaurant in Vianden. I ordered trout, and I got a whole trout - complete with skin and head and bones. At least they gutted it for me. It was very good, but it was a lot of work to eat it.

After supper, I refused to walk back up the hill (we would still be walking up now it if I had tried) so the guys went and got the car and picked us up at the bottom of the hill. We drove back to the house and called it a day.