I drafted the following post but failed to log it. I have a good excuse: I came home from the trip exhausted, coughing like it was going out of style and (finally) tested for covid. Oops, seems going to Europe is bad for my health….but the good news is that it seemed to be a fairly mild case. So here goes…
BeNeLux Redux
The last time I was in BeNeLux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg) was 2010 when I saw many of the highlights — Amsterdam, Luxembourg City, Brussels and Bruges. This time we were staying near Liege, Belgium in a small town called Oupeye where Glorie found us an excellent airbnb. We arrived on Sunday, explored to the south on Monday, explored to the north on Tuesday, and headed for Amsterdam on Wednesday. “We” was Sue, Glorie, Don and me.
Monday we “needed” to find a cache in Belgium, and chose to do the oldest cache in the country. Turns out several of our friends also found it that day, and while we didn’t meet any of those groups there we did meet two Germans which was nice. We also “needed” to find a cache in Luxembourg which was accomplished during a walk in the Ardennes in some woods that had seen lots of actions late in WWII.
Tuesday we went to the Netherlands, my 14th and last country of the trip. Specifically we went to Maastrict which is in the southeast of the country. A nice town; though very different from the “typical” red brick buildings in so many nearby villages and cities, Maastrict’s buildings are made of white (and off-white) stones and bricks so it has a different feel. One of my favorite geocaches of the entire trip was there — near a waterwheel that “hides” in a peaceful corner between some apartment buildings.
Wednesday we stopped by an American Cemetery and found a few other caches on the drive north to Amsterdam. Then we dropped Don’s and my luggage at our airport-area lodging and Sue and Glorie drove us to Amsterdam where Don found the Netherlands’ oldest cache (I’d found it in 2010) and we said our goodbyes near the Anne Frank House. Although we weren’t able to do the specific cache we’d hoped to do there, we did take a nice hourlong canal tour that explored several of the city’s canals as well as the Amstel river, for which the city is named. I was both relieved and disappointed that the canal tour did not get us into the red light district, but I was intrigued that Amsterdam’s coat of arms has three Xs on it….perhaps that’s the origin of X-rated.
After the canal tour we meandered our way toward the train station and had a nice final meal of the trip. Somehow it seems appropriate that the trip was bookended by a first dinner of spaghetti Bolognese and a final dinner of linguini with shrimp — I seem to eat more pasta in Europe than at home. Then we took the train to the airport (I think Don was pleased by my willingness to figure out how to get tickets and navigate the system), found a supermarket at the airport so I could stock up on airplane munchies, took the hotel’s shuttle bus and began the challenge of the final packing of the trip.
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