.luxembourg

.finally we did some longer journey and left this country for almost 10 hours :)
Our destination was small, yet famous and prosperous, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. It's capital, Luxembourg city (76,420) is only 82km from Saarbrucken, so after only an hour of fast speedway drive we've entered the old parts of the town. And after another 30 minutes we've successfully found some parking place (the chaos of traffic signs was huge...). So, close to midday, after eating some 1euro cheeseburger (and ending the threat of dying from hunger ;) ) we began an ascend into the center of the city (it's on a hill, bind with the other parts by numerous bridges). Around it lies ravine with beautiful natural parks, favorite place of relax for the inhabitants of the capital. After some time, the weather decided to be nice to us and the sun shined for the rest of the day. We spent some 4 hours among the old walls and superb views, traversing almost every street. It was worth it, definitely. As a result we have nice photos and exquisite memories. What we found as very unexpected, was an absolute absence of tourists in the streets and that the all shops were close (it's the same in Germany on Sunday?!).
But our day was not over yet, another stop was a small provincial town of Echternach (some 30km NE from capital, 4,507 inhabitants). Small in size, but not in turmoil. Exactly this day the apple festival was taking place here. Thousands of people everywhere, all shops open, it was like awakening from the capital's illusion :). As always we did some sightseeing, took some photos and tasted the fresh apple juice (soooo refreshing in the hot day like this :) ).
And then it was the time to go back, we took the shortest road along the vineyards (that was a beautiful sight ;) ). That's it for today, folks.

More photos available here.