We arrived in Luxembourg much later than we planned. After circling around the city a bit we ended up at the railroad station and stopped there hoping to find a hotel. The area looked very shady, though and all the hotels were sold out. Torn between hunger and the desire to get out of there we stopped a MacDonald’s. The MacDonald’s seemed to highlight the linguistic confusion of Luxembourg: all the menus were written in German, yet the girl behind the counter understood only French. (More often the opposite was true: all the signs were in French, but most people spoke fluent German.)

We managed later managed to find a part of town that looked less shady, and tried looking for hotels there. We were informed, however, that all hotels in Luxembourg were full due to some kind of EU function. So, we got back into the car and went looking for some place in the suburbs. As it turned out, however, Luxembourg didn’t have any suburbs: once we left the city we found ourselves driving in darkness through what was probably an industrial area. We finally took an exit into a place with a cheery name “Grevenmacher” which we misread as “Gravenmacher” and creatively interpreted as “The Grave Maker.” (So I started telling Luisa a story about “the witch of Gravenmacher” which seemed very appropriate given the darkness.)

While looking for hotels we ended up leaving Luxembourg and entering Germany. We soon found ourselves in Trier, where we were planning to go in the morning. After driving around back streets of Trier and almost running out of gas, we finally found a four-star hotel, which was a bit pricier than we wanted, but given the circumstances seemed acceptable. Next morning we decided we didn’t want to drive back to Luxembourg and just continued with our Germany itinerary.