After a leisurely breakfast with lovely fresh rolls, cold cuts, cheese, jam, and some fresh fruit including the first gooseberries I have had in years, we took off around 11 am for a short 45-minute drive into the Netherlands. Ralph and Ingrid have a few days off and wanted to explore a place that was new to them as well as to us, so we drove to a town called Schin op Geul, parked, and then went for a little hike through the town (or village) and along the Geul, a short tributary of the Maas, which then flows into the Rhine, and on to the neighboring town of Valkenburg, which had a mostly preserved old city core, and ridiculously picturesque ruins on a hilltop. It also had many many restaurants, since many tourists from other parts of Holland come to visit; we stopped for a lovely lunch at a café chain called “Brownies & downies,” which employs people with Down Syndrome and other cognitive impairments.
This area of the Netherlands, called Limburg, surprised me because a) it is Catholic, and I had thought that all of the country was solidly Calvinist-Protestant, and b) it is quite hilly in an otherwise completely flat, sea-level or below sea-level country (the so-called “Dutch mountains,” which Wikipedia describes as “slightly undulating” countryside). It is quite picturesque, especially Valkenburg (elevation: 77 m / 220 feet above sea level), but also the surrounding area, with many chateaus, old churches, and remnants of quarries and mines (alongside coal mining, limestone and a special kind of rock called marl/marlstone were quarried here), and we had a lovely walk.
Ralph drove us home on a route that took us back to Aachen through Belgium, including through a part where almost everyone is fully bilingual in French and German, and a strange former “no-man’s-land” (3.5 square kilometers / 1.35 square miles) called Neutral Moresnet that was never firmly French/Walloon, Dutch/Flemish, or German, but co-ruled by Belgium and Prussia from 1819 until World War I (it technically existed until 1921!) because none of the powers at the time was willing to give up the important zinc ore mine that was located there. Again, the landscape is very pretty, and we enjoyed the little detour. After we came home, we all rested for a while.
We had a delicious dinner of bread and two kinds of salad (one with tomato, watermelon, mint and feta which was a perfect summer dish) and then ventured out one more time for a brief (1-hour) walk that led us from Aachen-Brand through nearby fields, where we could see the viaduct and the convent from last night’s walk from far away. The most delightful part of the walk was that we saw and heard a nightingale! I have not heard one since I was a child, and I was so excited. They have a repertoire of hundreds of “tunes” (like mockingbirds, they like to imitate other birds) and they are quite loud. We taped some of the concert performance (by a juvenile, we think) and it was just pure delight. Then we also caught the sunset on the last stretch of country road before returning to the neighborhood. Pure bliss.
