OCR Text |
Show Luxembourg Between Planes by Pat Whitfield Your plane is delayed and you've got lurichtime through dinner hour to pass till you can reconnect with another flight. Or, there's an air controller's strike like the one in Paris recently and you're stuck, for a while at least. What do you do between planes? You could tour an entire country. If you're lucky enough to be stranded in Luxembourg. From Castlements to campgrounds, camp-grounds, almost all 62 miles of it can be seen in a few hours. Enough to capture the special flavor of this tiny European principality. From the airport, you might head north after renting a car. Were your stay to be a bit longer, you might seriously con sider one of the fleet of VW vans hopefully lined up in front . of the airport, veterans-all of" much European travel. The two lane ribbon of meandering highway high-way would take you through the Grand Duke's personal forest. Under the bows of its sentinel-straight sentinel-straight trees of undetermined age, generations of European nobility have ridden to hound seeking stag and boar. Bound for the thousand-year-old fortress of Vianden, you'll traverse rolling pastures, lushly green, with sleek dairy cattle munching contentedly. From these bovine beauties, the country coun-try folk blend the most delicious butter and cheeses. Tiny cars, so common in Europe because of astronomical gasoline prices, whip by at breakneck speeds boomeranging around the hair pin curves you will probably approach more conservatively. Some transport brilliant canvas bundles, campground-bound for a holiday. In Europe, a campground is a thing of wonder and beauty, more like a gypsy enclave than roughing it, U.S. style. Tents are as many colored as Joseph's biblical coat and modular, with the room combinations of a rabbit warren. No wide-open-space lovers, these Europeans. Habitually, they'll situate their holiday homes nearly on top of one another like in a Moorish bazaar, all helter-skelter and sociable-like. Some 35 miles from the airport air-port you'll reach Vianden, once a formidable fortress against equally formidable invaders. A thousand years have passed since its four-foot thick walls rang with warriors' cries or its dungeons echoed with prisoners' chains. Not so threatening today, to-day, its ramparts are more cordial with patches of bright flowers and a spectacular view of the Ours River Valley some 1500 feet below you. If there's time, you might catch the nearby near-by cable car ride to the mountain moun-tain top for a true eagle's eye view of the verdant valley. Retracing your route, you'll notice that Luxembourg's roadsides road-sides are perfect for a typical European traveling lunch. Just pull over, drop your tailgate or lift your trunk lid to check your wicker basket of delectables. Fresh baked bread, excellent cheeses, savory wine, some luscious lus-cious fruit and a few incomparably incompar-ably rich pastries should refresh you for your return trip to the city of Luxembourg. The ancient city looks today every inch the fortress it once was. At first glance its towering heights, honeycombed with fortifications forti-fications tell the tiny nation's history clearly. Yet, quaint architecture, archi-tecture, brilliant gardens and charming plazas reflect its more tranquil ways. The royal palace has the proper fairy tale quality, and, it you're lucky, you can see the Royal Family in person. Intricate wrought iron shop signs and bubbling fountains abound. Cobblestone streets will slow your steps to the proper medei-val medei-val tempo and deaccelerate your -strides long enough to detour to a sidewalk cafe for a pre-plane aperitif. It's ten minutes to the airport and you've sampled a country. Five hours in Luxembourg. Luxem-bourg. Just a taste, but come again for a larger nibble. |