Week 60: Altstadtfest and...two castles!

On the day of the summer solstice, yes, the longest day of the year, I was in the city of Vaasa, Finland for work. Vaase is located at about the same latitude as Reykjavík, Iceland. I should have known I would be in for a tough few days, when I landed at 11pm and it barely looked like twilight, despite the fact that the city was completely covered in clouds. The next day was surreal. It looked like mid-afternoon far into the night. I couldn't, for the the life of me keep the light out of my hotel room. My. I had never been so jetlegged when traveling only one time zone. And, the crazy thing about this place, was that people didn't have the rolling shutters on their windows like they do in Germany. I don't know how they sleep...maybe they do it all in the winter, when they have 20 hours of darkness.

Around 9pm in Vaasa

After I made it home and had a good night's sleep on Friday, Jason and I met up with the Luxembourg Ex-Pat group in the nearby city of Trier for the Altstadtfest (roughly: Old-Town Fest). It was the standard German festival, with plenty of food, beer, wine and various forms of entertainment. We watched a couple cover bands at one stage, then visited the cathedral with a few of the ex-pats. One of the cover bands called out Jason for rocking out and playing air guitar to "Breakfast at Tiffany's" by Deep Blue Something. Jason *swears* he was doing it ironically and was composing a progressive interpretation of the song in his head. I'll leave it to you to decide if he was telling the truth.

This band liked Jason's air guitar

So, the next day it was raining. And, what better thing to do in the rain in Germany, than to go to Luxembourg and visit castles? So, we did just that. Our first castle was Beaufort Castle in eastern Luxembourg. We had been here before, about a year ago, but they were having a concert at the castle when we arrived, so we weren't able to to tour it. This time, no concert, so we took our umbrella and looked around.

Jason, an umbrella and a castle

There was nothing particularly remarkable about the castle, but it did have some nice tall towers to climb into and a number of passages to explore.

Jason looks at a Beaufort Castle

Our next stop was the castle in Larochette. We had traveled through Larochette a couple months ago when we were hiking with the ex-pat group. We didn't have the time (or, frankly, the energy) to visit the castle as we walked through the town, so we returned on our own. It was very wet out at that point, so we didn't spend too much time exploring the the ruins, but inside one of the restored buildings were a series of exhibits by local artists--I was particularly found of Alice Niederkorn's work. There were a few pieces I might have been interested in taking home, but we can't hang things on our walls...

Ruined Castle at Larochette

Week 54: Adventure Park!

As you can probably guess, when we get any chance of a break in the weather, we like to spend as much time outside as possible. We had the opportunity a couple of weekends to go with the Luxembourg Ex-Pat group to an adventure park (okay...that is crazy...I can't believe there is actually a Wikipedia page for adventure parks). An adventure park is also known as a rope course and is where that special group of kids went in high school to learn "leadership" skills (or, I can only assume...I was never part of that group...they always talked about some awesome thing called a ropes course, so I figure this was it). The idea is you have a bunch of platforms up in trees with "elements" between them that you need to navigate. These will be things such as rope bridges, or other methods previously only seen in movies for crossing deep ravines.

Jason crossing a lava pit

The park we visited (Parc Le'h Adventures) is located in Dudelange, Luxembourg. This was not our first time at such a park. We had also visited one on the MA, NY boarder (Catamount) a couple times in the last few years--it is equally as awesome, so if you ever have the chance, I *highly* recommend it.

Zipline!

One of the best parts about the adventure parks we have been to, are the zip lines. (Quite frankly, I work my way through the other elements just to get to the zip lines.) You can see me on one in the photo below. In the US, they give you gloves with your other gear when you check in, so you can slow yourself down a bit on the zip lines without chewing up your hands. In Luxembourg, they didn't give us gloves, but instead had well padded trees, so injury was (generally) avoided.

The end of a zip line

There are a number of different courses at these parks and each varies in difficulty, starting with the kiddie courses for the young ones and those not so comfortable with heights, going to those primarily intended for Navy Seals or teenage boys. Since Jason and I had some experience with them, we started with the second hardest, which was pretty good for us. We then did the course two levels below the first and then the one one level below the first, making it through 3 courses in total. Most of our companions weren't quite a quick/comfortable and made it each only through 2. We did, though, have one member of our group who tried the hardest course, which included a "Tarzan" swing, which required swinging from about 35 feet in the air on a rope to catch a 4 foot wide cargo net that was hanging opposite at a similar height (don't worry, there is *plenty* of safety gear). Unfortunately, he missed grabbing the cargo net, so the staff had to pull him down with a ladder, but he had a great time trying, which is really all that matters.

Oh, and did I mention we had a perfect day out in the woods?