The day started on the Vianden Castle campsite… in case you’re not keeping up.
In the end it was quite a decent site… see below!
The plan was then to drive to Enternach, about 30km away (still on the Luxembourg / German border), have a wander around and to do the Gorges du Loup followed by the Camping Belle-Vue 2000 campsite in Benedorf.
Enternach
Enternach was our first stop today. A lovely town with an abbey to wander around.
But before we could do anything at all in this heat, we had to have a cafe stop in the square just to the side of the abbey.
Is there a “too early” to start drinking beer. The good news is that there’s loads of soft drinks left for us when the locals are all knocking the beer back at 11am! For instance there were three locals in the cafe at well before noon and seemed to be making a day of it. But everywhere you got the tipple of choice, at any time of the day or night, seems to be beer!
The abbey was founded in the 8th century by St. Willibrord who was originally from Northumberland and trained at Ripon monastery. There was a good info room and you could even walk down into the crypt and see Willibrord’s tomb!
Boy, it’s hot today. Not quite as hot as Cambridge’s 34C but it’s well into the 30s and tough to get out of the heat.
After a quick wander…
… we headed back to the van, saddled up and made our way to the local Cactus supermarket for some groceries.
Gorges du Loop – Not
We next tried to do the Gorges du Loup outside Echternach. But Apple Maps took us to the back of a campsite with no obvious way of getting into the woods. We wandered down the side of the campsite but retreated to the van thinking we’d best do a reccie with air conditioning!
We drove around the area a bit and headed to our campsite. On the way we spotted a couple of entrances to the woods but decided we’d pitch the van and see what the campsite said about hiking.
Camping Belle Vue 2000
And then on to camping Belle Vue 2000… not our favourite site.
This site is way too big and way too cramped. The only redeeming factor is that the WiFi is blisteringly fast, at least in comparison to any other campsite we’ve stayed at, and absolutely no signal dropout problems around our pitch.
Good job too… we spent the next 5 hours trying to find accommodation for the next few nights. We eventually found somewhere in the other side of Trier for tomorrow and then finally something near to Auchern (Black Forest) for three nights (assuming our reservation is confirmed as I write this late in the evening.
Where Next
I think we’re starting to realize that we’ll need to book a bit further ahead than just the next night. It was fine in the less busy areas but the Black Forest proved tricky!
After the Black Forrest we’ll try and get somewhere near lake Constance for one or two nights, then we think we’ll probably do an AirBNB or hotel in Munich after that.
We then think we’ll try and do the Eagle’s Nest WWII Hitler retreat after Munich and then do the Grossglockner pass after that. Then we’ll be into Slovenia and Croatia.
Thunderbolt and Lightning…
And at the end of the day we were treated to a evening light show… multiple massive thunderstorms rolling around the plains…
As we wandered around the campsite watching the thunderstorms, there were definitely bits of the site that weren’t as cramped as our bit. The camping section seemed to be a lot more jolly than our bit. It’s definitely still not our sort of campsite though🤷♂️
We now have 705 miles on the odometer this evening.
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