Tag: Liechtenstein

Luxembourg is a very small country, but has signs of occupation all the way back to the Paleolithic Age, roughly 350,000 years ago. It is down below the lower southeastern corner of Belgium with Germany and France as its other neighbors.

We visited Luxembourg City between breakfast and lunch on the day after we visited Belgium, having breakfast in Belgium, lunch in France, and dinner in Switzerland. In Luxembourg City, we were given a coach tour of the city and visited the Notre Dame Cathedral there.

Lunch was in the town of Luneville, France. Not much there in the area where we stopped. Just a cafe and a Cora store (similar to Kmart in the US). We explored the Cora after lunch. We liked getting fresh fruit to take along with us. We would sometimes also pick up some bread or pastries.

The afternoon break was in Basel, Switzerland, on the border of France, Germany, and Switzerland. It also spanned the Rhine. Since it was my first time seeing the Rhine, I was fascinated as we crossed over the river on a bridge and then drove alongside it for a while before making our pit stop.

The main things that I can remember about Basel all these years later (we were there in 1984) are the river and the manner of toilet flushing in the rest room. Because there is such a variety in the way that a toilet can be flushed throughout Europe (at least back then), we had established a ritual that, the first person into the rest room let the next person in line in on any tricks involved with getting that little job done.

Basel stands out because it took me a while to figure it out and it was so unique. I studied the toilet itself and the wall behind it; looked for something suspended from the ceiling or some sort of pedal on the floor. Nothing presented itself. Eventually, I noticed that one of the small, black, tiles in the floor (which was composed of several white tiles punctuated periodically by these small, black tiles) was raised a bit higher than the others. I stepped on it and voila!

As we approached Lucerne, Switzerland, we began to see mountains. I had never seen a mountain before, so I was absolutely awed by the Swiss Alps. We stayed on the outskirts of a village outside of Lucerne called Stans. When on a budget tour back in the 80s and early 90s, the hotels were all on the outskirts of any large city or in some village out in the country. Although it meant that we couldn’t see any major tourist sites anywhere near our hotel, it also meant that we often had some fun and/or interesting experiences when we went for a walk.

In Stans, after dinner, we encountered some preteen boys marching around together, carrying torches and wearing brown shorts and shirts. We found this to be very unsettling (they were also speaking German), so we went back to the hotel fairly quickly. At the hotel, we were told that it was some sort of scouting organization. Ah huh.

The next morning we drove to Mount Titlis where we took a train straight up part of the mountain, then switched to a series of three cable cars to get to the top, 10,000 feet up. A much earlier post, “A Swiss Miss”, from 2017, went into a lot of detail about how neither my mom or I were fans of heights and the difficulty one of the cable cars had docking.

As it swayed in the wind and snow with Mom and I standing in the middle of it, holding onto the pole there, I was imagining being found in the glacier below in another 3,000 years with my fingers still around the pole and Mom’s fingers still around my neck (I had been the one who had talked her into it — how often in one’s life does one have the opportunity to go up to the top of a mountain in the Swiss Alps?). We survived, docked, and took some photos of the view from the top. I also purchased a small cow bell as a souvenir.

Back down on terra firma, we had lunch in Lucerne and did some sightseeing. We visited the baroque Jesuit Church and then the Kapellbrucke, which was a covered, wooden footbridge that was built in 1406 across the Reuss River diagonally. It had loads of paintings on the inside dating back to the 1600s. We also visited a monastery, which was founded in about 750 and was dedicated to St Leodegar.

We set off for Austria, stopping off in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, for a quick pic of the castle there. Our destination was technically Innsbruck, Austria, but we spent the night in the village of Auland. Apparently some of the exteriors for the movie, The Sound of Music, had been filmed in the area. After dinner at the hotel in Auland, several people in the group went into Innsbruck for an optional evening at a nightclub there. Mom and I stayed behind in Auland and went on one of our walks where we encountered a rather stubborn cow on a narrow bridge who let us know beyond any doubt that we were the interlopers.

Next time – the Italian Alps (through the Brenner Pass), Venice, and Assisi.

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