No More France!
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♥Jun. 3rd, 2012 // 04:08 pm♥
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Well, maybe a little....
On Thursday evening, we managed another very good meal, in a restaurant that was otherwise deserted (although, to be fair, we were early by local standards. We'd spent the day either in or close to the hotel, lazing about and only emerging to wander around the weekly market, eat ice creams bigger than our heads (and, when I say 'our', I mean Mike has one...) and go to a creepy museum that was apparently made up of an old lady's collection of dolls that had taken over the ground floor of her house.
On Friday, after a brief stop in Orange (Roman), we headed off to Geneva, via lots of topography.
Geneva seems nice. We had a wander through the old town, caught sight of the fountain from a hill-top park and agreed that it looked incredibly badly bluescreened, wandered along the lake shore and wondered if we'd offended the fountain into turning itself off early, and finally had a lovely, if expensive, dinner in a restaurant called something like The Pig's Trotter (it was on the menu, but we didn't try it).
The hotel, La Cour des Augustins, was very nice but for two things: they provided a duvet but no sheet, so the air con was needed, and the bathroom had automatic lights, designed by a sad, lonely individual who had never even considered the possibility of one day sharing a bed with another person....
Today, we had another little wander around town and then, pausing only to get the hotel to extricate the car (we were - in a planned way - boxed into their tiny car park, but the arrival overnight of an enormous flea market on the surrounding streets made this harder, and getting the car onto the main road harder still), we headed off for lunch with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif) sneerpout, where there was both good conversation and steak cooked in the way I'd actually requested that it be.
Lunch meant we didn't stop again, other than a couple of service stations, on the way to Luxembourg, so it's been a long day of driving for Mike, but we've arrived in country number three of five-in-five-nights, and that's the main thing! |
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No France At All
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♥Jun. 3rd, 2012 // 04:10 pm♥
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Luxembourg has much more topography than I thought it would.
Our hotel, the DoubleTree, looked like a Soviet tower block. Trip Advisor had remarked on this but said that the newly refurbished rooms were lovely. Ours wasn't either lovely or newly-refurbished, and had what I very much hope will turn out to be the worst mattress of the trip.
Business hotel, so bloody SwissCom. Not refurbished, so not enough power sockets to set up the airport, so offline overnight.
We had dinner in the hotel, it being late and out of town. It wasn't nearly as good as the descriptions on the menu, but it was ok and the local wine was good. There was a smoking bar! Indoors, and everything! While I was in there, after dinner, two twenty-something Chinese guys came in, ordered cognac, looked around at the few, quiet people in the bar and wistfully asked the bar man if it would get busy later. When told that this was busy for a non-week night, they drank and left.
(This agrees with the size and emptiness of the restaurant, which does make you wonder. I mean, if your hotel is, say, half refurbished, and your expected occupancy for the night is, say, less than fifty percent, doesn't it make commercial sense to put your guests in rooms that are less likely to make them resolve to never visit again?)
Sunday morning in Luxembourg was decidedly grey and wet. We read the Wikipedia page about the city and decided that it wasn't exciting enough for the weather, so off we headed to Belgium instead. Belgium was also grey and wet, surprisingly.
We stopped in Ghent, had a wander in the intermittent drizzle and some lunch, and then headed on to Bruges. At which point the (rather elderly anyway, and frankly struggling with having has a map of northern europe stuffed into her brain) Sat Nav died. This meant I had to map read, which is something to generally be avoided, but we got to the hotel eventually: the Hotel Ter Duinen, which seems nice and has parking, which is a bonus around here. Still rather grey, but I dare say we'll go for a wander in town after Mike's finished reinstalling the Sat Nav ("I seem to have set it to Finnish...") in the hopes that that will fix it. |
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