Within the city of Luxembourg we’d had access to all three forms of its free public transit system: bus, tram, and funicular. Now we were going to move out into the country of Luxembourg to visit two historic locations, but like in the previous few days this wasn’t going to cost a centime to get there. The first day would require a train and then a connecting bus to Vianden, that one guide book described as, “…quite simply, the most picturesque little town in the Grand Duchy….” The next day we were on a train for about an hour to medieval Clervaux to see its 12-century castle (its garden view is in this paragraph) and the Benedictine Abbey.

Continue reading “Luxembourg cities”

Along the US coasts we’ve been from Key West, Florida to Maine’s border with Canada, from Vancouver, BC to Tijuana, Mexico and in the UK it was from Land’s End in England to the top of Scotland’s mainland at John o’Groats. In France we’ve traveled from the Pyrenees Mountain tunnel that joins us to Spain all the way up to Roubaix on the edge of Belgium. Now we can add one more border-to-border journey to our list, this time in the country of Luxembourg from Esch-sur-Alzette in the south to Troisvierges in the north. In America we were in a car while on this side of the Atlantic it’s been by train, as was this most recent vacation, but this time there was one big difference—the cost. The fare to go from one end of one of Europe’s smallest (but wealthiest) countries to the other end was 0 €.

Continue reading “Luxembourg City”

One advantage to living in France is that you’re never really all that far from Paris. In about  5 ½ hours we can travel from our downtown train station to one in the nation’s capital and walk from there to a hotel for that evening. With a dozen daily departures we can take our pick to be there for a 12:30 PM lunch, a 3:00 PM hotel check-in, or a 7:00 PM dinner. An overnight sleeper train would arrive in plenty of time for breakfast. That convenience means that it’s possible to make a connection and continue to a further destination such as Brittany, Champagne, or even London or Amsterdam. For today’s adventure we stayed in Paris but made a day trip into Normandy to spend the morning walking in the footsteps of artist Claude Monet in his beloved gardens of Giverny.

Continue reading “Monet’s Giverny”

Nantes had served as our home base for a couple of day trips to the Atlantic coast and now it was time to explore a bit more inland. Our travels took us to a picturesque town nicknamed “the Tuscan village of France,” and then on to Angers, home to the world’s largest surviving medieval tapestry. These train journeys were even shorter than the others, only about 30 minutes each, but like the previous ones everything we wanted to see was within a short walking distance from the station. 

Continue reading “Clisson + the Apocalypse Tapestry”

There’s a British TV comedy series that inspired today’s blog post title about a week we spent on the north coast of Brittany. In the show, when former mistress of the manor, Audrey, loses her husband, she sells the grand estate to a wealthy businessman but moves into the property’s small lodge house where she can keep an eye on the new owner. We both enjoyed watching it so it wasn’t unexpected when Bill asked me if I wanted to stay in a manor house. What did surprise me however, was that he was investigating a seaside vacation where we could walk along a rocky coast. Could this be the best of both worlds?

Continue reading “To the manor born”

When I saw the words “sleep tourism” (le tourisme du sommeil) in our newspaper, I thought that they were talking about “slow travel”. That’s something that Bill and I have embraced since moving to France, now that we no longer need to fly over here from the US, dash around seeing everything we can in 2 weeks, and then immediately fly back. Taking the train over long distances gives us a chance to enjoy the journey, the scenery, the food and wine, the legroom, and arrive downtown within walking distance of our hotel. In fact, since “sleep” was in the title I figured they were talking about overnight trains that are making a real comeback in Europe, giving you a comfortable bed allowing you to wake up in your destination city. We have already covered that topic and the book you see here in this paragraph in previous blog posts. But this new style of travel was something totally different.

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