Luxembourg

On the 15th we left Paris and drove to Metz (pronounced "mess") in Lorraine, on the Moselle. We had a walk through the park there and saw their canals.

We then moved on to Luxembourg, where we spent the night. There we saw the grand-ducal palace and some old caves where people would hide in war time. I started off thinking that it would be some tiny micro-state because I had only ever heard of it in conjunction with the BeNeLux confederacy and had heard something about there still being a Grand Duke. (It’s anachronistic enough to still have a king or queen but dukes-regnant are far more exotic!) Yet I found that it’s a bit bigger than it sounds: there are actually a few separate cities there with some space in between and it takes a few hours to drive across the whole country (that’s normal; it is Europe, after all!).

We ate a couple of meals at a fête that seemed semi-permanent; it seems they eat quite a lot of sausages and the Luxembourg speciality is potato pancakes with apple sauce, just like those Ashkenazi ones that I forget the name of.