June 2018

After our stay at the Hotel Brimer in Grundhof, Luxembourg, we go to check out Beaufort castle next door.  Half of the castle grounds are a maintained museum of the structure, which dates to the 11th century, the other half is a private residence.

In the museum area, it is quite impressive to see the masonry and scope and scale of the different areas and to find that the original sandstone sculptured spiral staircase is still in tact and you can walk up it even today, several hundreds of years later.

In the bottom cellars of the castle, they have brought in some torture device artifacts from other areas to setup a “dungeon” though none was ever part of this castle’s history. I suppose that will sell more tickets. But the iron maiden and racks are not replicas, they are real and I find it rather off-putting to look upon devices that certainly were used to bring pain and death upon real human beings.

 

 

 

We then make our way to my work event in Basel, Switzerland. Not a lot to see there and the hotel is quite utilitarian though comfortable. I am in the hotel for the week’s event and Reid is mainly on his computer, though makes his way to the conference room now and again to be among company, while still on his computer.

After the week concludes, we decide to head up through the Black Forest, aka the land of the cuckoo clock! We stay the night at a very nice little establishment called Zum Goldenen Rossle where the establishment owner treats us to a very fine chicken curry dish and upgrades our room at no additional charge.

The following morning, we head north to Black Forest Open Air Museum, where several old farm buildings from the area have been meticulously disassembled from their original sites and reassembled here for preservation. For those in Phoenix, think Pioneer Village, without the costumes.

The sheer size of some of these buildings is really impressive. Many housed the family, the animals and even all of the working labor all under one massive roof.

 

They had quite a nice setup of artifacts and the details of the exhibits were provided in German, English and French, making for a nice experience  and history lesson.

Reid and I finished our little European excursion by heading straight up to Maastricht in the Netherlands and then on to Laren for another Bed and Breakfast experience in the town we will shortly call home.