Today towards the dreaded Ardennes! I THINK I am taking them in from the high point, so that is probably good, but nevertheless even tomorrow and the day after the plan foresees quite some elevations, over 500 m every day! So not sure how these Ardennes are organized.
Today I think I was mainly riding TOWARDS the Ardennes but not yet really IN them, at least if one takes the definition of Ardennes as a mountainous, forested area.
Luxembourg itself seems to be a relatively sparsely populated country, so I needed some planning to make sure there were some places to eat on the way, but it worked out perfectly, and now after dinner I can say, that today was probably the day were I ate the best in this entire trip… and I probably ate all the meat that should be permitted per month if climate change could be averted…
For lunch I had identified Redange as a village with some options, and the restaurant I chose (the one with the best evaluation in that village) was excellent. I took the steak that was offered as one of the “plat du jour” options, and it was really a filet mignon rather than a steak, and very well prepared.
And now at dinner, already in Belgium but just about, a steak tartare which was also excellent… although a raw egg on top would have improved it even a bit more…
Talking about food, my first stop after about 20 in was in Steinfurt where I had second breakfast plus I bought an “Einback”, a simple pastry which I bought quite frequently in Germany as a child. I had my rest in the village square which had some strangely decorated trees under the pretext of an arts exhibition with the topic “Impf-Stoff”.
A good part of the ride today was on old railway tracks, which is really an extremely comfortable way to ride up or down an incline. I will research them more and maybe do some more excursions specifically to these kind of cycle ways. It seems that Belgium potentially is full of them, as apparently Belgium was the country with most railway kilometers before shutting down a lot of them and later converting many of them into bicycle lanes. Something to be explored.
But today it was the turn of some Luxembourg cycling railways, including this very, very chilly tunnel (fortunately it was well lit though).
These mushrooms along the way from far seemed like a piece of art, but actually I think they are extremely poisonous mushrooms. But nice to look at:
Luxembourg seems to be uncertain which language to use, so all the languages address used mixed. It is quite normal to see one warning sign in German and the next in French, or like today in the restaurant, the toilets were indicated in French, but how to open the door to the toilet in German. And then every now and then things are explained in Luxembourgese. It kind of seemed that people used preprinted material in any language, as long as it was readily available.
No comments:
Post a Comment