Luxembourg Day 2

Luxembourg Day 2

Sunday morning, Happy Mother's Day! I got nice cards from the guys and we picked up the hotel room to check out. Our hotel was awesome by the way, very nice and we scored a last minute, same night reservation for about half the regular room rate. Totally recommend the Parc Bellevue in Luxembourg. Our nice weather on Saturday was short lived and it had rained in the night and was still drizzling Sunday morning. We put on our raincoats and hit the streets anyway. Since it was raining Shelby wanted to move the car to the parking garage in the city instead of having to walk back to the hotel (less than 2 kilometers) so we did that first. Colin loves parking garages (and any place else he realizes he can hear his echo in) and will yell loudly so that he can hear his echo. He will just yell over and over again the entire time...of course that is until you put the camera on him and actually WANT him to do it! Usually we shush him the entire time we are in the garage. Here are some videos of him and his echo.

Note he walks on the line, silly boy!


In this one you hear him stop and say "auto" when he gets to the car, that is the German word for car, which he prefers to the English word at the moment.


Something exciting was happening in the city that day because there were barricades and police on the streets and they had shut down some roads and blocked off parking. Probably some parade or something, we left about 2 pm and nothing had started yet. We did see 2 motorcycle police escorts with a marked official car with a crown on the license plate instead of numbers. There was a lady in it and people were taking pictures of the car as it drove by. I don't know if they were tourists or if they knew who she was. The Duchess perhaps?

Since it was raining we went to the Bock Casemates first. They closed at 5 the day before and we missed them, and since they are underground the rain wouldn't bother us. The Casemates are a fortified castle, built on the Bock promontory in 963 by Count Siegfried. At it's peak, the Casemantes comprised 24 forts in three fortified rings, 16 defensive works and a network of 23 km of casemates. The casemates were capabale of housing thousands of soldiers and their horses as well as workshops, kitchens, bakeries, slaughter-houses. Later on during the World Wars the Casemates were used as shelters for protection. More info and pics about them can be found here. The views from inside were very cool since it is build into a bridge and you can see out both sides. Colin loved running through the tunnels and looking out all the holes. The stairs were crazy! Tight spiral staircases that I'm sure were a pain in the butt to carve out and make and to run up and down. After the casemates visit the rain had stopped so we wandered through some other areas of the city. While out and about we saw an old man who looked just like Santa Claus and he was wearing a red raincoat. He had a serious camera and was taking pictures, I told Colin he better behave! Here is some video of Colin walking around and asking for up. He'd been carrying a rock around waiting for us to pick him up and put him on the wall so he could throw it into the river below. You can hear him say "bye bye, see you" in it. He says this often...it usually goes "bye bye, see you, tchuss" Tchuss is German slang for goodbye and it's pronounced like chews. Colin waves bye bye, see you, tchuss to everything.


Here he is throwing his rock.


After a little more walking we stopped into a spring festival that had food booths and carnival games set up. Colin and I had brats and pommes (fries), and Shel ate a steak sandwich. There were all kinds of yummy waffles with sauce, beignets, crepes and other French and German festival food...we skipped all that though.

One last stop before heading home was the Luxembourg American Military Cemetery. There are 5,076 Americans buried here, most died in the Battle of the Buldge. General George S Patton Jr is also buried here.

It was a fun trip and I'm very glad we know how close it is now, it's a nice easy weekend trip and there is plenty to see.