Sometimes you look out your (bathroom) window, and the sky just puts a smile on your face.
After buying some fried fish, I decided to go for a little drive. After driving for a bit, I decided that it was time to go home; so I looked for the closest crossing of the Maas river and drove there. A few hundred meters from the ferry I suddenly noticed some donkeys standing in front of an old collapsed building. I decided to check it out.
The building turns out to be an old regional office of the national waterworks agency. Unfortunately the foliage was so dense that it wasn't possible to go inside. But the building was so small, that there probably was not much to be seen inside anyway.
After patting the donkeys for a bit I continued my way home. After crossing the Maas river I also ran into a very nice gazebo, but since there were some people having a picknick in it, I didn't bother to make a photo of it.
While driving from the movie theatre in Lanaken, Belgium to a restaurant in Maastricht, The Netherlands; I happened to pass by the remains of an old factory right in the middle of the city. I've always liked ruins, and fortunately, I had my photo camera with me .
I have absolutely no idea why this truck was covered in plastic, but there was a lot of garbage in the factory. My best guess is that it is being used by homeless people for shelter, or has been used for it in the past.
Ah oui, la France... Comment j'aime la terre des vins et du fromage savoureux...
My parents always go to the Alsace and Vosges mountains on vacation, and bring home stories of mountains, waterfalls and vineyards. I just had to see it for myself.So this year, I promised my parents I would visit them for a couple of days while they are on vacation. My cousin Kevin decided to tag along, and so we left on Thursday morning. My satellite navigation system said that the quickest route (577 kilometer) there was via German, but since the gasoline is cheap in Luxembourg, we decided to drive via Belgium and Luxembourg.
My parents were camping in a town called Luttenbach, which is a small and serene village. Apparently it is so small that my navigation system didn't know about it. It was still early when I programmed my navigation system, and of course... Murphy never sleeps. So... my navigation system did exactly what it had to do and drove us perfectly towards the wondrous village of Lutterbach. By the time we found out that we were in the wrong village (Lutterbach instead of Luttenbach), we were approximately 120 km too far south. If you've ever driven in the mountains, you know that even a small 30 km trip can take up to an hour and a half, because of all the twists and turns you have to take... So our small 120 km "detour" caused us to arrive on the camping site at 20:00, instead of the planned 17:00. The route home was much quicker, hehe.
The full photo album of the trip can be found in the "photos" section. We drove there on Thursday, and returned home on Monday. A small report:
Friday.
Due to the small configuration mistake with the navigation system, we missed the route that my parents said would be super to drive: the Col de la Slucht. This route is famous amongst bicyclists, but according my parents there's plenty to see for car drivers as well. Since we had to buy some food for the night anyway, we decided to drive over the Col the la Slucht to a town called Gérardmer. My parents weren't bullshitting, and the views were indeed spectacular. We also visited two small waterfalls, but due to the rainy weather we didn't spend much time there. After eating a very nice pizza in a local restaurant we drove back to the camping.
Grocery time! Luttenbach is a small hamlet on the outskirts of a village called Munster, and on Saturdays there's market in Munster. Munster has two very distinct features: Munster cheese and storks. Storks? You mean the baby bombers? Yes, those storks! The village is crammed with them, and they're pretty much everywhere. One small note on Munster cheese, by the way... keep your nose closed! My god that stuff smells bad.
The highest mountain in the region is the Grand Ballon at 1423,7m. On the top are a small weather station and a restaurant with a nice view across the valley. Unfortunately for us, it was a bit cloudy, and we couldn't see very far. A cool thing that we did see was the water vapor rising up from the woods.
All in all, it was a fantastic trip, and I will definitely return there some time to check out more of the region.