Wednesday 13 June 2018

Wednesday 13 June - Wiltz & Echternach

Where's Bertie? He's in a car park next to the Youth Hostel by the lake, just outside of Echternach (exact location: 49.80063, 6.41633).
Weather: Overcast but dry, with a bit of sunshine late in the afternoon.

Even though we stayed in Wiltz until early this afternoon, we still failed to see the castle. That was because I decided that the 10km walking circuit looked more interesting than the 7km one I had originally intended us to do, and it wasn't until we got back to the town that I realised that the longer route didn't take us past the castle. Admittedly it wouldn't have been a large detour to nip past it on our way back to Bertie, but Mick didn't feel so inclined and I wasn't fussed enough to argue.



A couple of snaps from our walk.

I'm sure that at almost any other point in this trip we would have stayed put in Wiltz for a second night, as it was quite a pleasant place and the motorhome parking was quiet, but we have a date in Mannheim on Saturday, so after lunch off we rolled.

Our first stop was a small detour off route to a LPG-selling petrol station at Diekirch. There we filled Bertie's gas tanks at 52.7c/litre and filled his diesel tank at 111.7c/litre. Even at today's reduced exchange rate, that equated to diesel at less than £1 per litre. As for the LPG, we had only used 30 litres in the 6.5 weeks of Bertie-use since we last filled up, which is an unusually low amount, but we stayed on campsites/places with hook-up on 12 nights over that period, meaning the fridge has been run on electric more than normal, plus in Scotland I didn't feel the need to heat water for showers in between campsites, which must also have saved a reasonable amount of usage.

Anyway, with Bertie's fuel tanks full, onwards we tootled along the Luxembourg side of the border with Germany, along the edge of the area marked on our road map as 'Little Switzerland', to the town of Echternach.

It all seems rather nice around here, although today's explorations have only extended to a walk around the lake:


Having never been to Luxembourg before, nor to the immediately neighbouring areas of Belgium and Germany, we had no idea what to expect of the country. With meadows abounding, and lots of forests and lumpy terrain, some of what we have seen so far has put us in mind of mountain villages in France. The main difference here is that the highest point in the entire country is not much more than 550m above sea level.

Even though we've only been in the country for a couple of days, we've seen enough to have formed the intention to visit the south of the country on our return route in August, albeit it will likely be another passing sort of visit (the lure of cheap diesel and gas is a bonus, but not really a consideration in this decision!).

No comments:

Post a Comment