A big small country, or a small big country? As European micro-states go, Luxembourg is macro. By dwarf standards, a giant. At 2,600km2, it’s positively Russian compared to compact Andorra (468km2), tiny Malta (316km2), bijou Liechtenstein (160km2), minuscule San Marino (61km2), microscopic Monaco (2km2), and nano-scale Vatican City (0.4km2).
A proper country, with its own army and football team and beers and language and everything (yes, Luxembourgish, a should’ve-gone-to-Specsavers distortion of German). A Grand Duchy, no less, whose longtime economic streamlining with Belgium and the Netherlands (as Benelux, which sounds like a vacuum cleaner) showed the way for the EU, of which it is an enthusiastic member: the border-wiping Schengen Agreement is named after the Luxy village in which the treaty was signed.
Schengen is down at the southeastern corner of the country, and that’s where I’ll end this pocket-sized End to End. And I began today at the northern extremity, which is, er, an Aldi.
I stayed last night at Gouvy, in the south of Belgium. The Simon and Garfunkel song was appropriate, because I was indeed Feelin’ Gouvy. Thanks to the Dutch peer-to-peer cyclist hospitality network Vrienden op de Fiets, I had a cosy holiday cottage to myself for €25.
My miniature odyssey started with a few miles’ rolling pedal through damp drizzly farmland to the Luxembourg border. The northern limit of the Duchy is marked by two stones, one of them a fine pointy thing like a giant iron counter in a board game of international warfare.
Indeed, this very location used to be the tripoint where Prussia, Belgium and Luxembourg met: the marker is dated 1843. International territorialising now is more about big business, so it’s appropriate that the furthest-north thing in Luxy is a branch of Aldi on a borderlands industrial estate. I’d had a fine breakfast in my cottage, so I didn’t need to drop in.
First impressions of Luxembourg were that it consists chiefly of petrol stations, which tells you something: cheaper fuel prices here mean it’s a destination for Belgian drivers to fill their tanks. Petroleum tourism. Second impression was of a lot of slugs crossing the road.
My recent End to End of the Netherlands started with a tripoint followed immediately by the country’s highest point, and that was mirrored here. Luxembourg’s top summit is Kneiff, a bland, rounded hilltop a couple of kilometres from that Aldi on a quiet rural lane.
At 560.05m – that five centimetres is clearly vital – it’s a whole metre loftier than Buurgplatz, which until 1997 was thought to be the Duchy’s Everest.
So it was downhill all the way from here, through thickening fog and clammy drizzle. There was a succession of Saturday-quiet villages and towns with nobody about, and humdrum roads through rolling green farmscapes – not unpleasant at all, but little to quicken the pulse, certainly not the gentle ascents and downhills.
However, an exciting plunge down from the village of Noertrange got me to an excellent railtrail, running 21km along the old line between Wiltz and Bastogne, in Belgium.
This was a joy: no sound but birdsong, the hum of my wheels on smooth tarmac, and the rumble of my stomach. (Today was a sandwiches-subsistence day.)
I rode up to Schleif and back to enjoy the lush river-valley scenery before following the track into Wiltz, where I had booked the only affordable Saturday night accommodation in the country this bank holiday weekend.
Wiltz wasn’t exactly overwhelming at first sight this rainy, gloomy afternoon. The centre seemed unfocused and annoyingly stretched out up and down slopes, the supermarkets were grubby, and outside the Grand Rue there were no promising places to eat.
However, my afternoon was rescued on finding the Brewing Museum, right in the castle off the Grand Rue. Wiltz is something of a beer town; Simon beers are based here, and there’s a microbrewery in the museum itself. Even better, the tours – and tastings – were free today, thanks it being Museums Day, or something.
Claude, the brewery guide, proved a genial and enthusiastic host. I was particularly impressed with he and his fellow brewers’ promotional activities over the years. Belgian popular culture is strong on comics, bandes dessinées, and they’d commissioned a series of Astérix-style humorous graphic novels setting the legend of Gambrinus, the King of Beer. In a variety of languages, of course – including Luxembourgish.
I supped a refreshing bottle of the microbreweries’s Elixir (spicy, gingery, hints of toffee apple, Elixir and Vienna hops). I was assured that, as a low-alcohol but full-taste ale, it was ‘good for cyclists’.
Hmm: 3.2% isn’t that low. But I wasn’t complaining. And, though I can’t understand much Luxembourgish, I can certainly understand the international language of beer.
A good day. Cheers!
Miles today: 35
Miles since Aldi: 31