So Luxembourg is a small country that lies directly between Frankfurt, Germany and Paris, France. If you draw a line from Frankfurt to Paris on a map, it almost goes directly through Luxembourg City. We had 7 days before our flight out of Paris left for Hanoi, Vietnam. We figured that 7 days in Paris with a 2 yr old would be kind of like going to the fair and not riding on any of the rides, so we chose to cut our Paris trip down to 4 days and spend 3 nights in Luxembourg City. Although we had never actually met anyone who went to Luxembourg on vacation, the guidebook made it sound pretty good. When we arrived at the train station in Frankfurt, we discovered that you can’t actually take a train directly to Luxembourg City. This should have been our first clue that we should have just gone straight to Paris. We ended up taking a short train ride to a German border town and then got on a bus to Luxembourg City.
Luxembourg City (three nights)
The weather turned rainy on our last few days in Germany and it continued to rain when we arrived in Luxembourg. We were able to book a really nice hotel right in the “Old Town” of Luxembourg City. It was expensive, but we wanted some place nice to stay after all of the running around we did in Germany. Turns out that the nicest part of our trip to Luxembourg was the hotel room. It’s not that Luxembourg City is not nice. On the contrary, the city itself is very modern with lots of great restaurants and shopping. Problem is that it is all very expensive. The old town part of the city was built on a bluff overlooking a winding river, but as we’ve said before – we’ve sort of already seen this layout and are over it. We happened upon the changing of the guard ceremony at the Grand Palais (which was sort of neat) and the end of a Sunday service at their Notre Dame (which a few days later we compared to the real Notre Dame – not even close). There are some cool views and some nice strolls to be had, but when you stack it up against the rest of Europe, it just does not compare.”
At this point in our trip, we had already surfed some of the best waves in the world, climbed Mayan Pyramids, seen sharks, rays, and giant sea turtles fight over fish scraps, visited countless castles, fortresses, and other cool monuments in Europe and seen some of the Swiss Alps. You start to get a bit jaded after all of that, so I am sure we did not give Luxembourg City the chance it deserved.
One of the most interesting things (for Christy, not Chris) was the elephant statues that were scattered around town. There was apparently an upcoming charity auction benefitting elephants that was entitled the “elephant parade”. Not sure how that related to Luxembourg, but coming across elephants around every corner was kind of fun and made for the most interesting pictures of the three days.
It rained fairly constantly while we were in Luxembourg, so we spent an inordinate amount of time in the hotel room. We even watched a movie on the computer for the first time in 4 months. One night there was a concert right outside our room – which started rather scarily with some form of German slash metal (at 4:30 pm), but ended rather nicely with some reggae (11:30 pm). The rest and relaxation was great and it was probably a really good idea given that we were headed to Paris next. The food in Luxembourg was very good but, once again, expensive. If you like to shop at designer clothing stores (which we don’t), than Luxembourg City is a great place to go. If not, it is a little boring.
Oh well, you don’t find a winner every time out. On to Paris….
