I completely forgot that on day 3 we actually went to a musical instruments museum, which was a good few hours. I don't know why I forgot?! It was a really good museum actually, and the instruments were accompanied by headphone jacks that you could plug into to hear a sample of the music made by each instrument. The only thing that I would say is that the museum wasn't very well maintained and some of the lights were out, and some of the jacks wouldn't work. I also had to work overtime on translating as most of the labels were only in French and Flemish. I can't really complain though as it was really inspirational and really really interesting and as under 25s we got automatic student rate at only 3 euro each!
I wouldn't really write about the evenings in hotels, but I am sure as you continue reading you will know exactly why I am writing about the night of day three.
We were planning on leaving the hotel before 9am to drive the scenic route to Luxembourg city via. Vianden. We had planned the drive and had settled down for an early nights sleep by 10pm. We heard some commotion in the hallway and someone knocking loudly on the door of one of the other hotel rooms. Martin was annoyed and the guy was still making some noise so we watched some hour long documentary, and then turned off the television after that. They guy was still out there yelling in French, and we heard him say "enough is enough" in English, so we could only assume that he had been locked out of his room by someone else. Half an hour passed, and he was still keeping us awake so Martin, charged out of the door in his cow print pyjamas and nearly ripped the door of the wall told the bloke to shut up. and walked into the room again.
So they guy shut up for maybe half an hour, but he then went and had a cigarette in the damn hallway. We were annoyed as being freaking suffocated and tried to use the ipad to take a video of him under the door! That didn't work and we couldn't exactly march straight past him to reception and complain so I attempted to ring them. They didn't answer. Damn. We heard other people down the hallway complaining to this bloody idiot, and going back to their room. In the end Martin fell asleep by 1am, which was more important as he was going to drive. I remember still being awake at 3am.
Day 4
The following morning as we left our room and went to check out, the bloke was still standing in the corner, looked up at us, and then looked away sheepishly in to the corner. I guess he was ashamed, and so he bloody should be! He was middle aged so he should know better. We complained to reception upon checkout and they just said it was odd, because there should not be anyone in the room next to us. The receptionist did go up to investigate as we were leaving for the car.
The drive to Vianden was pretty good, some nice views. We were a bit annoyed that there was a lack of "Welcome to Luxembourg" signs. I followed on the paper map, so it was pretty easy. We did however nearly end up in Germany due to Martin forgetting to brake for a bend. xD We drove along the German border, and followed the river. The castle at Vianden was pretty easy to find and we stopped of here as planned for a visit to the castle and a break from the car.
I got to speak German for the first time on the the holiday. Weeeee.
The castle was in ruins until it was restored in the 1980's, it has been restored to the point that most of the upstairs rooms, were in the liveable state of the era. So the rooms were decorated and there was music of the era playing in the background. It was so awesome. I kept on landing in my daydream world and therefore walking off. Haha.
There were some epic sets of armour in the museum part, and halberds! check out this guy.
We got back in the car and preceded to drive on to the capital Luxembourg.
This part of the drive was quite interesting, as we had to drive on some crappy flyover type thing behind a lorry over the river as they were building some type of hydroelectric dam. Then no less than 20 minutes later we were directed by the Satnav to go on to a motorway that hadn't even been built yet! They were cutting the tunnels through the mountains! Bearing in mind this Satnav was around 7 years old and not updated, that is a bit odd!
Anyway we got into the city and the Novotel was on the Kirchberg Plateau, which had loads of building work and roadworks, so we drove around for an hour looking for the car park, we could se the hotel and not the car park! Frustrating. in the end i ended up asking the parking attendant of the European court. He didn't speak English so I asked in German and he replied in French. Thanks to his help we found the car park very quickly, but ended up parking in the Novotel suite car park instead of the Novotel car park but they were not bothered.
Our room had a nice view and a bath! yaaaaay! I hate showers that I am not used to.
We walked into Luxembourg centre, which took about 30 minutes, but we had to walk over the pont rouge (massive red bridge) which Martin was not a fan of doing! We wandered around the centre for ages and then walked down to Grund which was the old town that was right at the bottom of the valley. This was really lovely and is apparently a good place for nightlife?! We ended up eating at Quick burger, and waiting 20 mins for our burgers again, and we went to the tourist office to plan the next day. We went for a fairly early night and caught up with emails and blogs etc... as we had had a very busy day.
Day 5
We got up and wandered into the main town. We had pain du chocolat for breakfast nom! We then went into both sets of Casements, (underground fortresses) and we looked around the Notre dame cathedral and saw (obviously we didn't go in) the burial crypt of the royals of Luxembourg. The cathedral had some art exhibition in it which was quite interesting. I can't remember where I put the card but I will post the web address on a blog when I find it. We wandered some more around the whole city and saw gringotts! Well not really but the bank of Luxembourg which had underground vaults. We had McDonalds and then headed back to the Kirchberg plateau. we wandered over to look at the philharmonic hall, and then found the art museum which we walked past and got some awesome views and pictures. We went past the 3 acorns redoubt museum, which was closed and had a look at the national park type area, ans what looked like a grassy mastaba (step pyramid). We also found ourselves looking at some old fortress ruins. We then headed back to the car, after debating which church was which, that we could see from the top of the step pyramid.
The drive back was unspectacular, and it only got dark as we crossed the French border from Belgium and the roads only got busy as we reached Lille. We did take a few wrong turns, mainly due to the Satnav not knowing the road layout, but luckily we were able get back on the road I would say that we only lost about 15 minutes. We got to Calais quite early and had to wait for quite a while. The crossing was fine, and we spent our time competitively playing angry birds space.
It was pretty damn foggy in Kent, and again unspectacular and we arrived in Hockley with 40 miles left on the tank of petrol. So all is good. Got in the house at around 2 am :D
Trollbyt out!
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