Great music in the land of Fab 208
Saturday, July 21
Camping Kockelscheuer, Luxembourg City It’s easy to sit around and do virtually nothing when the weather is this good. On our first day in the capital we slobbed for Britain, pausing only to check out the campsite chippie, which was run by one of the receptionists. At five, he knocked off from the desk and wandered over to the little hut by the kids play area, fired up the fryers and dispensed the cheapest beer anywhere we’ve been so far – €1.50 for a very acceptable locally brewed lager. Well, after a couple of those we couldn’t resist a bowl of chips as well. That was tea sorted! On Wednesday, we stirred ourselves from our torpor and cycled into the city for the first of what would turn out to be three trips in. After parking the bikes up, we had a good wander around, enjoyed a Skyride (one of those fairground rides that hoiks you up into the air and slowly rotates you for 10 minutes), had an ice cream and bought a French road map from a bookseller with the most perfect English. We told him we we were from Derby and he responded with “Eyup miduck”. When we challenged him that he must, in fact, be English he smiled and said he was actually from Luxembourg... “But I had an English nanny.” When half the population drive around in Porsches and Mercedes I suspect there are plenty more like him and certainly we never came across anyone who didn’t speak excellent English, to the extent that whenever we asked anyone if they did, the response was usually a stunned “Of course!” As if we should have doubted them. On Friday, we took the excellent bus service into the city to check out the locations for the blues festival the following day. We had a lovely afternoon wandering through the Grund district which is at the bottom of the cliff that Luxembourg City stands on. Helpfully, there are a number of free panoramic lifts and even a funicular which take you from one level to the other. Grund is a much older, cobbled area than the swish, moneyed part of the city which looks down on it from above. A cluster of traditional houses, bars and restaurants, mixed with more modern workshops and colleges, it seemed to be a brilliant location for a jazz and blues festival. We saw the stages being set up and, with the fine weather anticipated, it seemed set to be a great event. Come Saturday evening, we took the bus back in, enjoyed a few beers in the sunshine, a plate of sausage of chips from a street seller and saw some excellent bands, not least the Blue Chevys in a church hall. They were late coming on due to a protracted soundcheck but when they kicked off (still with a muddy sound) they were quite brilliant, grinding out a Brian Setzer/Stray Cats-style sound, aided by a two-man brass section and a terrific lead guitarist. At first, the hall was half empty but by the time they hit their stride with a storming version of Chuck Berry’s You Never Can Tell, their sound had pulled dozens more in off the street and the place was packed with dancing middle-aged punters, exactly our constituency. With the last bus at 11.45, our time at the festival was limited and it was a shame we had to miss some of the acts who would be playing on to about 2pm. Next year we’ll be back in a little Airbnb apartment to make the most of it and this great little city. Monday, July 23 Camping Municipal, Thionville, France Just 40 miles south of Luxembourg we found our first stop in France at Thionville, which had been recommended to us. Run by the formidable Lisabeth (“I am ze queen of comping”), the campsite is a tidy, clean and basic municipal site, right on the Moselle river. Our pitch was a shaded plot overlooking the walkway that runs alongside the Moselle and which featured a strip of temporary bars and restaurants, part of the river festival which the town organises at this time of year. Our plot was a good size and quite close to the sanitary block which featured some of the oldest, strangest showers we’ve come across – tiny cubicles with a shower head in the ceiling attached to a chain which you pull to give you about 20 seconds of lukewarm water. It was hard not to think you’d wandered into an old Turkish-style toilet by mistake. The town itself is typically French – grand squares and pedestrianised streets full of shops that were either shut (it being Monday) or shut down (this still being a recession in France). We saw the start of a theme beginning to emerge, as what shops were surviving tended to be tatty clothes boutiques, kebab joints or Jane’s favourite, the merceria selling wool, thread and all things sewing. Luckily, the campsite (a very reasonable €14 a night) and the cheerful festival is enough to keep us around for a few days and we amuse ourselves with little bike rides along the river and a drink at one of the festival stalls where we watch the world go by over the course of a couple of lagers. Wednesday, July 25 Aire, Port de Plaisance, Pont á Mousson, France We’re trying to keep costs down at the moment after an expensive few weeks so after a couple of cheapish nights in Thionville we head for a €10-a-night aire situated by a marina, about 30 or 40 miles further south along the Moselle. Quite new, highly recommended and spotlessly clean, it’s another municipal facility with free WiFi and good loos and showers, albeit only between 8am and 8pm. The other plus point is a free washing machine! Actually, that’s not fair on the town, which is another lovely, traditional French ville, albeit with a few too many kebab shops and boarded-up store fronts for my liking. The capitain at the marina is a dour Frenchman but his wife is much chirpier and tries to sell us the merits of the town every time I pop in to give her our daily site fees. On Friday we go for a bike ride, only to the local Intermarché, and later visit the town microbrewery for a tour. Our €5 buys us a tour of the premises by an earthy French brewer, complete with tattoos and piercings. It’s probably very interesting but as it’s all in French it’s difficult to follow all the finer points. There is a compensation, though, in a free tasting at the end and a free bottle of whatever you want to take away with you. After all this excitement, we were hoping for a spectacular view of the ‘Blood’ lunar eclipse, scheduled for 10.21 that night. Binoculars and cameras to hand, we took up our positions by the river at 10.15 only to find a cloudy night obscuring the phenomenon. Oh well, maybe next time... in around 80 years apparently. On Saturday, we had a look around the morning market and picked up a tourism discount card from the TIC. This gave us a few Euros off the price of admission to PAM’s most famous attraction, the grand Abbey. There has been an Abbey on the site for centuries but the present building, a huge complex on the banks of the Moselle, dates from the 17th Century. It was virtually flattened by bombs in 1944 but, remarkably, it was rebuilt in the 1970s and now operates as a hotel and conference centre, its religious purpose having been all but erased. We saw the splendid structure of the Abbey itself had been turned into an impressive wedding venue, although the marriage ceremony itself takes place in a simpler cloister elsewhere in the building. On Saturday night we headed into the town for a live music event and settled down outside a bar to watch it unfold. On a huge stage at the top of the market square, six singers and two dancers chirrup and contort themselves in what is billed as some kind of rock opera. Of course, it’s neither ‘rock’ nor ‘opera’, instead being a collection of French MOR songs sung by what appear to be failed French X Factor contestants led by a woman who could be the French Susan Boyle but actually sounds like a cross between Edith Piaf and Miss Piggy. The two hoofers, meanwhile, are the sort of artistes who give ‘interpretive dance’ its deservedly bad name. After an hour or so, as the sun went down, even the hardy souls who’d brought along their own chairs for the event were starting to flag and we joined them in heading for ‘Le Exit’ and went in search of a kebab shop. They were all shut! Sunday, July 29 Camping du Chateau, Montagny-le-Roi, Val de Meuse, France On our journey down to the Riviera to meet family and Marianne – the gang who joined us in Tossa last October – we’ve resolved to start putting some miles under our belt. Hence, on Sunday morning we left our cushy berth at the Marina and headed south for 80 miles to a municipal site in a rural spot. When we got there, the place was virtually deserted, apart from two or three units and an English couple, Peter and Sandra, en route from their retirement home in Spain to Liverpool, via a visit to family in Amsterdam. We struck up a conversation and resolved to have a meal and a drink later at the camp bar which, we were assured, would be open for business at 4pm. I must say, I was dubious... why open just for a few hardy souls? By the time we met them for drinks, the site had been invaded by a lengthy succession of mainly Dutch vans and caravans all using the site as a stopover on their way to sunnier climes. With the temperature here still hovering around the 30°C mark, they must have wondered if they needed to drive all the way to Spain for their annual dose of sunshine. At the bar, with P&S, we enjoyed a few beers and glasses of rosé, plus a meal of chips and fried meat before we adjourned to their van for a nightcap and the usual swapping of life stories. A lovely night that persuaded us to spend two nights here instead of the one we were originally planning. |
Pictured, from top, some typical French pastries from a boulangerie in Pont à Mousson; a view of Luxembourg City from the top of the Skyride; scenes from the Jazz and Blues festival; the campsite at Thionville: sunset over the Moselle at PAM; six shots of the Abbey, now a hotel and conference centre; below, our tour guide explains the brewing process
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