The Luxembourg "Express"

October 3 is a national holiday in Germany - it's German Unity Day. Yes, as in the reunification of East and West Germany, taking down the Berlin wall, etc. Definitely a good thing to celebrate, but I find it interesting that, unlike holidays in the US, Germans celebrate the holiday on the exact day. No switching it to Monday to make a long weekend.

Dh has to use up his vacation time, so he took Monday off, but our dds had school and I had German class on Monday. We did, however "celebrate" with dinner out at our local Pizza Hut. It looks just like a US Pizza Hut and has a similar menu. And, I'm pretty sure it's the only place in Germany where you can order a pitcher of pop. Even the drinking glasses were large, American-sized - not the tiny little tumblers that German restaurants serve.

Anyway, with our holiday yesterday, we decided to go to Luxembourg. The girls love the idea of seeing a new country on a day trip and we thought it would be a lot of fun. Mostly, it was a lot of wet. It was pouring rain when we left Frankfurt and pretty much rained the whole day. What should have been a 2-2 1/2 hour car ride took three. This was in part because of the rain but also because of my car. We took 2 cars on this trip as we invited a friend and her daughter along. They moved to Frankfurt about a week before we did and then her husband started a new job with the State Department involving a lot of travel, so he's gone until some time in December. Her daughter goes to the same school as ours, is on dd#3's Destination Imagination team and in the same Girl Scout troop with all 3 dds. So, anyway, we thought it'd be fun to invite them to go to Luxembourg with us.

Unfortunately, my new little used car decide to throw a windshield wiper about 1/2 hour into the trip. All of a sudden, it flopped the opposite way it was supposed to go and then just flew off the car altogether. Fortunately, it was the passenger side wiper, but still, we had to stop and click the wiper arm out so it was perpendicular to the windshield to prevent scratching. It just sits there and rotates on itself while the other wiper wipes - several nearby drivers gave us some weird looks.

Anyway, in Luxembourg, we took the hop-on/hop-off bus tour and saw a bit of Luxembourg City. Of course, it was raining a lot of the time as well. We stopped at a mall for lunch and our international grocery shopping - required on every trip to a new country. We saw some of the beautiful tarts that Luxembourg is apparently famous for and even ate a couple. The raspberry one was wonderful!

After getting off the bus, we searched for the entrance to the casements, a series of tunnels built into the cliffs that have been the heart of the defense of many governments in Luxembourg. However, the entrance we found was closed and after we walked around and shopped in the old center of the city, we realized it was getting late. Fortunately, we left when we did, as it ended up taking nearly 4 hours to get home. The rain was still terrible most of the time, but traffic was the real problem. After some kind of customs inspections of all trucks on the German border and whatever else caused traffic stoppages, the radio informed us of additional traffic problems (in German, of course). Our navigation system decided to send us the curvy, winding, hilly, scenic route to avoid addition traffic problems, but those were tough roads to travel in the rain, fog, and increasing dark. So, the drive that should have been 4-5 hours roundtip turned into 7 hours - not really a day trip kind of drive. Certainly not the express! :)

By the time we dropped our friends at their house and made it back to our own, dh and I were exhausted. Which made it all the more fun for him to get up and leave the house at 5 a.m. to drive to the Hahn airport and catch a flight to Italy. And I had a great day cleaning up the water that flooded our basement during a violent rain storm on Saturday. Due to the holiday, we didn't get to talk to our landlords about the problem until Monday night and the plumber couldn't come until today. So, we spent the better part of 5 hours sweeping, cleaning, pumping, and mopping out two rooms of the basement that had been filled with sewer water. Always a treat! :)

All-in-all, I think maybe we should have saved it for a sunny day. I'd like to go back to Luxembourg, see the castle and the casements and all the other sights that it was too dark, rainy and foggy to see yesterday. And maybe even do it as an overnight trip. Anyway, assuming we get my windshield wiper fixed and, even better, get dh's new, larger car so we can take 7 people in one vehicle, I'm sure wherever we travel will be slightly more successful than this trip was.