Just a quick trip...

So. A couple of years ago, one of my wife's relatives mentioned something to her off-handedly. 

That's really the crux of the story. The boss' aunt happened to mention "Hey, there's this thing called 'The Flower Carpet' every other year in Brussels. You should check it out if you have a chance."

Cue my darling wife setting a calendar appointment to periodically check hotel rates in Brussels. She ended up trading in points and getting us a room in downtown Brussels, 2 blocks from the main square where the flower carpet was displayed.

Changing gears for a brief second: Every year, I spend the month of September back in the states. This visit will be a little special, since Cori is turning 21 on August 20th. I thought it'd be appropriate to head back to the states a few days early and celebrate this milestone birthday with her. So, we bought me a ticket to fly from Frankfurt to Knoxville on the 18th.

Guess when the Flower Carpet is this year. Go ahead, guess. August 15th-18th.

So, looks like we're taking a last minute trip to Brussels. We drove out on Thursday, drove back on Saturday. I fly out on Sunday. How do I keep letting myself getting talked into this?!?!?

Thursday was a holiday, so we hit the road late morning, for the 4 1/2 hour drive to Brussels. We took a different way out of Germany (seems like we take a different way out every time!) and this time we happened to see a Haribo factory from the highway - and y'all know how we love factory tours!

It took us about 15 minutes of backtracking, but we made it back to the factory. They didn't advertise any kind of factory tour, but they did have a factory outlet store, so we (of course) stimulated the local economy.

Eventually, we made it to Brussels. Because of very strict emissions laws there, we couldn't drive in the actual city itself. We'd originally planned on parking at the airport and taking a train or metro into town, but our family travel agent had discovered a "park and ride" garage at a major metro station. We parked and  rode the metro downtown. The app that we used suggested getting off at a specific stop and walking a couple of blocks, which wasn't bad. Turns out, there was another metro stop right next to the hotel, but we'd have had to transfer metro lines at least once - it was quicker and easier just to walk.

When we travel over here, our normal pattern is to stay in the outskirts of the city, rather than in the center of downtown. We've found that for the price, we typically get better rooms the further out we go (within reason). We don't mind "commuting" downtown to get to the tourist areas, since the train/metro/bus systems are so extensive over here.

I think this is the second time we've stayed in the center of town, with Dresden being the first. While we probably won't change our pattern, walking out the front door of the hotel and immediately being in the thick of it is a nice change.

Immediately in front of our hotel, there was a water feature. Picture a shallow wading pool (with a couple of fountains in it) in the middle of the street. Looking at Google Street View, evidently the street was open to traffic a couple of years ago, and when they closed the street, they put in the little pool. Lots of foot traffic in front of the hotel, kids walking around in the water - just a cool area. (The pic is from the internet, the restaurant on the far left is attached to the hotel... the next door to the left of that restaurant is the revolving door for the hotel. The big building in the center of the pic is on the main pedestrian drag, the flower carpet is one block behind that building. The spire sticking up above that building is on the square were the flowers are - you'll see more pics later.)

That afternoon, we walked around downtown, and made our way over to the flower carpet. I'm not a big flower guy, so I didn't get too excited about it, but based on the crowds, it's evidently a big deal. You can see the crowd on the far side of the pic below. Unfortunately, the family photographer wasn't focused on exactly what I wanted to share pics of. We've had a talk, and I've been assured that it won't happen again.

The next morning, we had a free walking tour at 10:30 which met in the square with the flowers, so we made our way over there. Lots and lots of people crowded around to look at the flowers, so let's talk about them for a moment.

Assumption Day occurs the Sunday nearest to August 15th. The date the Flower Carpet opens is the Thursday prior to Assumption Day, every other year. Kinda. It started in 1971 as an advertisement for a landscaper from Ghent, and was such a hit, he continued doing it every year. The city/state government got involved after a few years (in 1986), and created an "Association," and the Association turned it into a biannual event. An application has been submitted to UNESCO to grant the Flower Carpet the status of Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

Having said all of that, they fill the main square of the city with flowers. Lots of flowers. More than a hundred volunteers work to place close to a million flowers on a 19,000 square foot plastic template. Lots of flowers.

Did I mention enough times that there were lots of flowers?

So, on our tour, we heard about the history of Belgium and Brussels - turns out it's got a pretty complicated history. It's a pretty small country, and over the years has been ruled by several different monarchies. Now, the country is divided into 3 autonomous states: the French speaking state of Walloon to the south, the Flemish speaking state of Flanders to the north, and the Brussels-Capital Region close to the middle.

Everybody's heard of Waterloo, where Napoleon lost? That's on the outskirts of Brussels. Who knew? Certainly not I.

Anyway, lots of pretty buildings and sights on the tour:

Also, right next to the main square, we found a statue of Everard t'Serclaes, who was a 14th century citizen of Brussels. Upon the death of John III, Duke of Brabant, the Count of Flanders (who had married the duke's younger daughter) seized the city, refusing to allow Joanna (the older sister) and her husband Wenceslaus, Duke of Luxembourg entry. Everard t'Serclaes and a group of patriots scaled the city walls and drove the Flemish from the city, returning leadership to the "proper" folks. 

They created a statue of his corpse, and rubbing him is supposed to bring you good luck.

From a historical note, I found these following things interesting (skip it if you're not into history:

Wenceslaus's half brother Charles IV ended up being Holy Roman Emperor and presided over the Imperial Diet, which decreed the Golden Bull of 1365, which set rules which governed the Holy Roman Empire for over 400 years.

Additionally, the whole succession business caused quite a crisis. in 1354, Duke John III summoned representatives of all of the cities and announced that in return for their acceptance of marrying his older daughter (Joanna) to the Prince of Luxembourg (Wenceslaus), he would offer them liberal concessions. All was well, until his death the next year, in 1355. In January of 1356, Joanna and Wenceslaus signed the charter, agreeing to the provisions her father had established. Soon thereafter, Louis II (the aforementioned Count of Flanders and husband to the younger daughter of John III) invaded and occupied Brussels, making the charter meaningless. Everard t'Serclaes got the Flemish to leave, and when Joanna and Wenceslaus entered the city in October of 1356, the charter (that they'd originally signed) took effect again, and the document was renamed "The Joyous Entry of 1356." That specific document is considered the equivalent of the Magna Carta for the countries of Belgium, Luxembourg, and The Netherlands.

Enough with the historical nonsense, right? 

Our next stop was what our tour guide Tristan called "The most overrated tourist attraction in Europe": Manneken Pis (that's Dutch for "Little Pissing Man"). 

The famous statue dates back to 1619, and there doesn't seem to be any real story about it. I have found information about the history of the fountain, the location, the almost 1,000 different costumes that they dress him up in... just about everything you'd ever want to know about a 21 inch tall statue of a peeing little boy, except for the most important: WHY?!?!?

One interesting building we saw... the Brussels Palace of Justice. Originally erected between 1866 and 1883, at the time of its construction, it was the largest building in the world. Construction was originally projected to cost four million Belgian francs (equivalent to the country's entire annual public works budget at the time), but by the time construction was finished, the cost had ballooned to over 50 million Belgian francs. It remains the most important court building in Belgium. In 1984, they started a renovation project on the building, and mounted scaffolding around the building.

It's still there. Forty years later.

The scaffolding is so old, it's become unsafe and needs to be replaced.

After our tour, we wandered around and stimulated the local economy a bit, finding a couple of cool chocolate shops.

One of the things that Belgium is known for (you may remember this from our Bruges trip) is chocolate.

Godiva is probably one of the best known chocolate manufacturers in the world, and they were founded in 1926 in Brussels. Their original location is right on the main square (with all of the flowers). Of course we had to buy some from there.

Right next door to Godiva is a shop called "Mary." Turns out, Mary was founded in 1919, and since 1942 has been a Royal Warrant Holder for the monarchy of Belgium. There are 8 companies which supply chocolate to the Royal Palace (actually, Godiva is a Royal Warrant Holder as well, they just don't seem to brag about it as much as Mary does). As a part of the agreement, the company is allowed to use a specific coat of arms while advertising their product:

Here's one of the crests in one of the stores:

We wandered around town (stimulating the local economy as we roamed, of course), and ended up eating dinner in the restaurant in the hotel that night. As an aside, I had a boule of sourdough served in a metal pan (reminded me of a little paella pan), which had been cut into wedges and covered/stuffed with garlic butter. So... now I'm looking for one of those pans and I'll keep my eye out for a local bakery that sells boules of sourdough. 

The next morning, we took our time getting the room packed up and hit the road home late morning. 

On the way home, the boss scheduled a stop at a Birkenstock outlet. She's been wanting to get a pair, but felt like she wanted to do more research first - she just wanted to take a look and see what kind of prices they had. Evidently, they're pretty proud of their shoes there, as the prices weren't much lower than we've seen elsewhere.

As we were heading out (without telling our family accountant), I mapped our next destination to an outlet mall about an hour and a half outside of Frankfurt. I had originally looked at the site for the mall to see if they had a Birkenstock outlet as well - they didn't - but I saw that they had two stores that I knew she'd appreciate. At one point, she glanced at my phone (with driving directions on it), and asked where we were going (since the arrival time wouldn't get us anywhere near home). I told her that I'd made an executive decision, and we'd be making another stop.

We parked and walked into the shopping center; our first sight was a Ravensburger outlet. She was quite excited about it, and bought 4 puzzles (which you might have seen pics of on Facebook), while only spending around €30. She was quite proud of that!

Right next door to the Ravensburger store was another Haribo outlet. We stocked up on more gummy stuff - we both had a trip to the states coming up, and wanted to bring some stuff back for y'all! 

I think that's it for now, no trips for a bit, since we're both in the states for a while.

Wine. Did I say "wine"? Yep. Wine. Lots of it.

So... we just got back from our anniversary trip. Wife heard a while back that Marriott has a property that's an actual castle, so of course we just had to stay there. In retrospect, the whole "anniversary in a castle" thing might not have been as much of an unplanned coincidence as I originally thought.

We may have uncovered a serious problem. Turns out my wife now identifies as royalty, and has been insisting on referring to herself in the third person. That (by itself) is bad enough, but having to bow to her every time I enter or leave the room she's in has just gotten tiresome.

I picked her up from work on Wednesday afternoon, and we headed out west. The castle is located in the Mosel Valley, named after the Mosel River. The Mosel river flows through France and Luxembourg before emptying into the Rhine River in Koblenz, a city about 50 miles (as the crow flies) from Frankfurt.

Geology nerd stuff incoming - skip the next paragraph if you're not into it:

Over the eons, tectonic plate movement caused the Rhenish Slate Mountains to rise between the Eifel and Hunsrück Mountain ranges. The Mosel river wound between those ranges, wearing down the softer limestone and creating the Mosel Valley, leaving the relatively hard and dense slate scattered on top of the ground. The erosion of the limestone created very steep inclines (allowing for extended periods of exposure to the sun), while the cracked slate covering the ground acts as a heat sink, combining to make one of the most fertile areas in the world for growing grapes. There are records of ancient Romans making wine in the region as far back as the second century, as the cost for transporting wine from Italy up to the region was exorbitant.

Because of the geography of the valley, these vineyards are considered the steepest vineyards in the world, with up to 65 degrees on inclination. With the vineyards being that steep, all of the tending of the vines has to be manual, and the vintners use trolleys running on a single rail to move supplies and workers up and down the slopes. I thought those were pretty cool, so I made the family photographer take extra pics of those.

The castle was built in the 1880's for a German industrialist and winery owner. It's currently a 49 room hotel affiliated with the Marriott hotel chain. I can't tell when it was purchased - I suppose that doesn't really matter in the whole scheme of things.

We unloaded our suitcases into the room and noticed that the hotel had put a small bottle of wine in our room for us. (Bottle count: ½ bottle)

walked around the little town, finding a local eatery for a quick dinner.

Returning to the hotel, we stopped at the reception desk to take advantage of a previously offered complementary glass of wine, which we enjoyed in the library. I guess royalty does have its privileges!

Thursday we woke up and had breakfast, then took off to explore the nearby area. We ended up in Bitburg.

Bitburg was founded about 2000 years ago as a stopping point on the journey from Lyon to Cologne. As we learned during our tour of Cologne, the cathedral in Cologne has been a well known destination for catholic pilgrims for much of its history. Lyon, at the time, was one of the largest Roman cities west of Italy, and a major city for banking and commerce - it remains the second largest city in France (after Paris, of course). 

Feels like I might be getting a little into the weeds with the history, and we're only in the second day of the trip! Moving on...

One of the major attractions of Bitburg is the brewery, the third most popular in Germany. We found out that there would be a tour later in the afternoon, so we bought tickets and headed out to explore the town for a while.

Walking toward the pedestrian area, we passed by a second hand store, so of course Her Royal Highness had to go in. Luckily, she didn't find anything she couldn't live without... my luck wouldn't hold for the whole weekend, though (spoiler alert).

It started raining as we left the store, so we stopped at a cafe for some cappuccinos to try to wait it out. We wandered a bit more, and had a quick lunch at a local restaurant. Once we finished eating, we headed back to the brewery in time for our tour.

We took the brewery tour, our first one in Germany! We've done multiple tours in other countries in the past, so we didn't learn anything new, but each had a beer and pretzel afterward.

We got back to the hotel in time for our wine tasting; in addition to a winery that's affiliated with the hotel itself, the hotel allows different wineries to use their wine cellar to host tastings as well. We had signed up when we arrived, and met the owner of the company, along with the other guests. 

The wine tasting was given by the founder of the winery, who had just purchased the land for his winery a couple of years ago. His grandmother had taught him about the wine business, so he named the winery after her. We sampled six different types of Rieslings, and ended up purchasing 6 bottles.

(Bottle count: 6 ½)

The food offered at the tasting was just about the right amount for my dinner, but the wife would need to eat some more, so we loaded into the car and drove to the next town over and bought some supplies at the nearest grocery store. Instead of heading straight back to the hotel, we decided to go ahead and fill the car up, since we'd be needing gas sometime the next day.

The hotel was right on the river, but to get to the gas station, we had to drive back out of the valley and over the mountains. The road climbing out of the valley was spectacular, winding straight up the mountain, through vineyards, with myriad switchbacks. We stopped several times to take pictures:

We eventually got to the gas station, and while filling up the car, I saw a vending machine that appeared to have items which had been lost in the mail; it was one of those circular ones, where you select which level you want, then open the sliding door. All of the packages looked like Amazon packages with the mailing labels torn off. All of the items were €10 each, so we just had to get one of them. I chose a promising looking one, and ended up with 2 phone cases for random phones (that we don't own), and an off-brand smart watch. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, eh?

We stopped on the way back to take a few more pictures, and I went down to the pool when we got back.

Friday morning started with Breakfast, followed by wandering through the neighboring towns.

The next town down the river is called Bernkastel-Kues; we wandered around there taking pictures.

We ended up going to Trier after leaving there.

Founded by the Romans in the 1st century BC, Trier is considered Germany's oldest city. We had a quick bite to eat, and toured a couple of churches:

First up was the Liebfrauenkirche (Church of Our Lady). Constantine the Great commissioned the first church on this site in 326AD. The church had become dilapidated by around 1200, so construction began on the current building in around 1230, finishing around 1260. Part of the roof was destroyed in WWII, but other than that (and minor repairs), the church has stayed mostly the same since then.

Next was the Trier Cathedral. Considered the oldest cathedral in Germany, it was originally commissioned around the year 270. The current building was constructed between 1235 and 1270. 

One of the significant things about this particular church is that it (supposedly) contains the "seamless robe" of Jesus. According to one story, Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great discovered the robe in either 327 or 328 in the Holy Land, and bequeathed it to the city of Trier, where Constantine had lived for some years before becoming emperor. That's one story.

There are a couple of other stories relating to the robe though; one of them places it in a church in the outskirts of Paris, while yet another places pieces of it throughout several churches in Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine.

We saw the display case for the robe; it was inside a dedicated room at the end of the church. From our vantage point, you could see the case, but nothing that was in it.

Afterwards, we wandered around the city for a little while, and the boss ended up touring through something called "Porta Nigra" (Latin for "Black Gate"). For unknown reasons, the gate was never finished, but that didn't stop the Romans from using it as one of the four main gates to the city for centuries - until the end of the Roman era. The name dates back to the middle ages - no record remains of the name of the building during Roman times - but even back in the middle ages, the gate was known for its dark colored stones.

During our exploration, we bought another bottle of wine (bottle count: 7 ½).

After our wandering, we headed back to the hotel for another wine tasting. This one was at the winery that's associated with the hotel. We enjoyed our tasting, purchased a glass each, and sat out in the courtyard, drinking and waiting for a rainstorm to pass. Once it had passed, we went back into the store, retrieved our purchased bottles of wine, and headed up to the room to drop them off. (Bottle count:11 ½)

We headed back out and had dinner at an Italian restaurant in town; pretty good food.

I went back to the pool when we got back to the room, while Her Royal Highness went climbing. She walked to the end of town, and climbed up to the top of one of the hills to take pictures of the sunset.

We ate breakfast the next morning, packed up, and left the hotel, but instead of driving straight back, wanted to follow the river for a while, stopping at whatever different towns caught our eyes.

First major stop was a little town called Traben-Trarbach, simply because it had a cool looking bridge that I wanted to walk over. We parked under one end of the bridge and walked across, exploring the town on the other side. We stopped for a light snack and a glass of wine, then continued exploring. Unfortunately, there were a lot of antique stores; luckily, the boss didn't buy anything - she did see one closed store that had prices marked on everything, and made me promise that we'd come back, as they had a bunch of Westerwald pieces with decent prices. We continued wandering, walking back across the bridge and exploring the town on the other side of the river. We bought a couple of bottles of wine there too. (Bottle count:13 ½)

At some little town, we encountered a flea market, so of course, we stopped. Wife ended up getting a couple of pieces of pottery at the flea market; one was €3 and one was €13. When she was washing them at home, the handle broke on the €3 pitcher. I glued it back on, but she was able to see for a fact that it wasn't Westerwald, so she didn't feel too bad about it.

We stopped a little later on at a little town called Valwig, simply because we saw a vending machine on the side of the road that sold wine. In taking pictures of it, the logo on the machine was the same as the logo at the store next to it... turns out, the store was the manufacturer of different kinds of liqueur; we got a couple of bottles before we hit the road. (Bottle count: 13 ½ bottles of wine + 2 bottles of liqueur and a sampler box)

We finally made it to Cochem, our main destination on the way home. Unfortunately, there was some sort of festival going on, and we weren't able to find parking anywhere near the town. We decided to come back another time, as it's only a couple of hours from the house. Really cute town, though!

Our final bottle count for the trip was:

• 13 ½ random bottles of Riesling
• 1 bottle of black cherry liqueur
• 1 bottle of strawberry liqueur
• 1 sampler box of random flavored liqueurs 

That's it for now, we've got a little trip planned next week, so stay tuned!