Weekend trip to Luxembourg

Luxemburg has been on my raider for quite some time. It’s a beautiful area that extends from a to somewhere north east of France. Basically it’s a massive forest where you should be able to hike really well. However, it has been very difficult to find an affordable accommodation. That’s not so surprising, given the fact that Luxembourg is one of the most expensive countries in the world. This time, I spotted a vacation park in the middle of nowhere, the prices were close to what we are used to (20-30 € per night per person). Amalia initially didn’t like it, but I managed to convince her towards the end of last year.

Maybe because not much time has passed since the last weekend trip, it was not so easy to find enough participants this time. It was only a few days before the event that we were complete. That’s a stark contrast to the last one. Well, at least we were complete, and I also really liked the group, so I didn’t really mind.

There were in total 3 cars (Giampaolo, Tyra and Amalia’s). Since we were only 8 people we decided to use only two of them and left Amalia’s in Düsseldorf. It’s nice that we’ve got so many cars nowadays, allowing us to explore more areas.

This time I bought all the stuff for the whole weekend. It was close to 30€ per person. That sounded really a lot, even if we consider that it included two dinners, two breakfasts and one or two lunches. Well, ever since the Bad Berleburg disaster, I make sure that we have more than enough, even if that means that people must take a lot of stuff afterwards. After all, it’s still cheaper than eating out.

Four of us (Amalia, GP, Anita and me) went in GP’s car. We left Düsseldorf some time after 6pm, which was a lot later than what we had initially planned. Luckily, the distance was not so much this time, so by 9pm we arrived at the apartment, where the other four had already been there.

The area is kind of separated from civilization. Maybe for this reason, they simply “left the key on the table” instead of in-person check in. I really got confused when they first wrote me this message, but that’s apparently how it works there.

Following the lesson I learned from the Harz trip, I took two rolls of toilet paper and two dishwasher tabs. This turned out to be a brilliant, yet not good enough move: There was a dishwasher, but no dishwasher tab at all, and there was only one not even complete toilet paper roll. I really regretted my decision of taking only two dishwasher tabs, since it anyway doesn’t take much space. Well, at least I took two, and that still made a huge huge difference. Also, it was just a great idea to take garbage bags, because there was none provided.

For dinner, GP planned pasta with pistachio cream sauce. I prepared a salad, as always. I could also take over the dinner, but apparently GP really likes it, so I don’t try to mix in. Hilal and GP basically did the whole work, and the rest of us were simply relaxing in the living room.

The house had two floors. The lower floor had four sleeping rooms with two beds each. The upper floor was the living dining room plus kitchen. That’s a fairly rare configuration. I was anyway happy that there so many rooms downstairs.

After dinner, we stayed in the living room for some time, maybe until midnight. Since I didn’t plan a huge hike for this weekend trip, we also didn’t have to go to bed so early.

Day II (March 15, 2025)

I’m taking anti-histamine these days, so I cannot get up very early in the morning. When I went upstairs there were already some people preparing breakfast. Just like last time, we bought a lot of fruits, bread and eggs. This morning Hilal made scramble egg / omelette.

Just like every time, I had bought wraps for lunch, but people actually preferred bread instead. There was fortunately enough bread, but maybe I should make sure for the next time to bring more bread. After all, it costs like nothing, and it can be easily taken back home.

Some time around 9:30am we left the house. Right in front of the house, there was a trampoline, which was simply open to everyone. Contrary to the normal spanned trampoline, it was filled with air, and so I guess it was a lot safer, but was also super difficult to get onto it. So, some people even struggled to get on in the first place. It made really sense that they forbade shoes, because you could easily step on other people.

We drove around half an hour to reach the hiking area. It took me quite some time to find an interesting place, and here it was. It’s called stone labyrinth, for the fact that you would go through very narrow paths between huge rocks. We have done something similar in Greece, and we were just as impressed at that time.

I was always wondering which language people speak in Luxembourg. I still don’t have a proper answer, but apparently locals speak French either as their native language, or when they talk to strangers. And so I could hear a lot of people speak French. In the radio we heard also mostly French, but sometimes we could hear Luxembourgish. That’s a variant of German, and frankly it just sounds like German with a little bit of accent. It probably also makes little sense (mostly in terms of efficiency) to have its own language in such a small country.

We had a really warm weekend last week. That’s a bit over this weekend. It was quite cold. At least it was mostly cloudy/sunny, with not a single drop of rain. That’s good enough for this time of the year.

The labyrinth part was fairly short, but I think most of the photos we took in this hike were from that part. We had a short break towards the end, where there was a park. It was a huge park, but quite visibly there were not enough kids. We occupied one of the huge tables which could have easily hosted more than 100 people with only 8 of us.

I had hoped to be able to break through the construction site to go through the nature to reach the cars, but the construction sites are probably proper construction sites in Luxembourg, and not like the ones in Germany which people cross just like this. So we took the main street (?) and then the same path go to back to the cars.

The reason why the hike was so short today was because we wanted to visit the Luxembourg city (and initially also because of the Ramadan for Hilal, who in reality skipped it for the weekend). We parked the cars in a park house in front of the train station, and took the nearby bus to reach the city center. Public transports are for free in Luxembourg, which really makes things a lot easier for tourists like us. The electric bus we took looked also super modern and advanced.

It’s a fairly hilly city. We crossed a huge bridge to reach the city center. At the same time, the place looked super clean and sophisticated, a little bit like Swiss cities. Well they earn money for similar things, so maybe that’s where the similarities come from.

We first looked for a café. There were obviously quite some of them. The first one we found was unfortunately too crowded, but then we still managed to find a neat one. Obviously the waiter spoke English, but his mother tongue was French. Again, generally people spoke French there, with some people speaking English. I don’t think anyone spoke German.

After the café, we walked around the city Giampaolo had already been in Luxembourg some years before, so he guided us through the city. There were also suggestions coming from Tyra, Dora and Simon. Anyway I was happy that I didn’t need to do anything.

As I already stated above the city was a very hilly place, so that we were looking over the valley very often. And as I have already stated, the weather got quite cold now. At some point it was nice to sit in a warm bus again, to go back to the city center and then to go back home.

We tried multiple times to pay, but the machine didn’t accept anything. It turned out that the city of Luxembourg was financing the parking cost on weekends. In particular, on Saturdays it is free for up to 4 hours. We didn’t know anything about it, but we were leaving just below 4 hours. We did everything so right!

Since we were back home fairly early, we also took time for cooking. Some of us started taking a shower and the others were simply relaxing in the living room. Giampaolo and Hilal at some point started preparing dinner. I prepared pretty much the same salad again, which took only a few minutes. Then we were just waiting in the living room, playing Dixit. I actually bought two more extensions for this trip, because we have played it already multiple times, and it’s not so nice to say the same things over and over again. People apparently really liked the new cards, although I have to say they were a bit less abstract, and I see a certain danger that we would indeed come up with the same terms.

The dinner was ready around 9 pm, so the fact that we had a lot of time did not help us have dinner earlier today. Giampaolo was just too tired to have dinner. It’s really great that he’s always motivated to make dinner, but maybe I should take it over the next time, since it takes much less time if I prepare it. This being said, it was really good, so I cannot complain.

After the dinner, we stayed there a bit longer to continue playing Dixit. Then we also played a game that Doro had brought. The evening ended well: I won big. So great.

At some point we woke Giampaolo up, and we all went to bed. I slept like a baby.

Day III (March 16, 2025)

Just like always, I didn’t plan anything for the last day. Amalia found out that Trier was just around the corner, and it turned out that except for me no one had visited Trier before, so it was a great occasion.

For breakfast, we had a lot of wraps. We did our best, but there were so many remaining. Obviously we took all of them back home.

We spent quite some time distributing the food among us. Not quite as much was remaining this time, but still a lot to carry. Nevertheless, I think we had a good quantity this time, as there was nothing missing, and we also didn’t have to throw away anything. The food was 40 € per person in total, which is a lot, but considering the amount that people could take back home maybe it wasn’t so bad.

Check out was supposed to be by 10 am. That was too early, so we simply ignored it. Still we managed to finish by 10:30. When I took back the key to the office, I realized that it was anyway unoccupied, meaning probably I could have taken back the key at any moment. At the same time, I realized that I was going to get my deposit of 150 € after they extract the electricity cost. I wasn’t really aware of this. And had I known it, we would have probably also tried to spare some electricity, which again would have been actually also useless, as it turned out about a week later when they returned the deposit, that they didn’t extract the electricity cost. So in the end, we were lucky that I didn’t notice that we were supposed to pay the electricity cost.

We then headed to Trier. It’s a Roman city. I’ve met a few people from Trier, who were making fun of Xanten, because while they are both Roman cities, Xanten is only a reconstruction. Well we got one Greek and one Italian in our group.

We parked our cars in the city center. It was 3,60 € for I can’t remember how much time. Anyway it was a reasonable price.

The city is fairly small, and we could walk to all the tourist attractions within an hour or so. As Trier is the birthplace of Karl Marx, there was a huge statue there, with elaborate explanations in Chinese.

We visited the black gate, the cathedral and a nice garden. By the time Amalia was bored and Tyra and Simon had to leave earlier, so we decided to go back to Düsseldorf.

This weekend trip’s group felt quite different from last time. It was more quiet and there was less party atmosphere in the evening. I actually really liked it and apparently the others felt the same way. Overall the things went also quite smoothly, maybe except for the dinner.

I just would like to write down all the items that we should not forget next time: dishwasher tabs, toilet paper, small towels, kitchen paper, garbage bags, aluminum foils and cutting boards. Well cutting board sounds a little bit exaggerated, but for all the other things I think it’s really worth taking them.