I am so glad we decided to drive through Luxembourg, it's such a beautiful country and the roads are fantastic to drive on! Not a pothole in sight.
We discovered Esch Su Saur from a Reddit thread about where to visit in North Luxembourg. We didn't fancy the South as we'd heard it was pretty expensive, being the richest country in the world.
After parking up, we were presented with this beautiful view of the village overlooking the remains of the fortifications and the River Sûre.
Walking up a steep hill and some steps, we reached the footings of the Castle, which you can see in the images below. Interestingly, there isn't much history on how the Castle was first built; however, they do know it was owned by the Lord of Esch Su Saur for many years and passed down through his family.
The tower in the image below is the oldest part of the castle, and later in life, after the fall of the castle, it was used to house the homeless and needy in the Village.
You can walk under here and see the old fireplace - I am sure it kept many a person warm very happily.
A later addition was the Church; you can see from the colour and pattern of the stone work that this was added much later. The bedrock this has been built on is visible and you can see where its been worn down after hundreds of years of daily footsteps.
To reach the watchtower, we had to walk down from the castle, across the Village and up some stairs which seemed like they went on forever before reaching the path at the top.
When we reached the Watch Tower you could climb high up inside up a winding narrow staircase and overlook the castle and the Village below. It really did feel high up there. What we did find interesting was how the Trees surrounding were still higher than the Watch Tower. In Wales back home we are used to Castles sitting at the highest point towering above the rest of the land for miles.
This poster made me chuckle to myself as a funny, almost translation to English - Cuisine For Terror - Sounds like a scary meal to me! 👻
Here are some of the pictures of the village as we walked down for some food before heading back to the Van and moving on.
I love how there are steps going down to the water, it makes it so inviting. I live to swim outside and had it been a different day I’d have happily swam here.
That’s one sad aspect about the UK currently is how much sewage gets pumped into the rivers and makes them not safe places to swim =(
This is the first meal out we've had since arriving on Europe’s shores 7 days ago. We were pleasantly surprised to find an Indonesian Cafe at the bottom of the Watchtower steps which had 4 vegetarian options - Wahoo!
We opted to share some Spring Rolls which were called Lumpia on the menu followed by an Apple Pie - Which was high on the list of favourite apple pies, certainly made the top 10. Winkel43 in Amsterdam is still winning though.
Over all my first impressions of Luxembourg are very favourable, you can see the investment in the national infrastructure, the roads, the streets, everything just looked solid and well put together.
It was pleasant to witness what the investment in your country can do. Of course, we only saw a very small part of Luxembourg, but the parts we saw were fantastic.
