Half of Europe in a day!

Well, almost. Today we drove from Illange, in northern France to Kerkrade, at the very bottom of the Netherlands. It'll be our base for exploring Maastricht and Aachen, both of which are half an hour away from the hotel. We also went via Dinant, which is a nice small place with a big rock at one end.

You can see my photo gallery for Dinant on Flickr here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/81692166@N05/sets/72157646193893654/

To do this, we travelled through a grand total of five different countries! France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. Here is our route:

Our route for today

We first stopped off in Luxembourg to get some fuel. The fuel there is much cheaper than everywhere else in Europe, and apparently so are cigarettes - one lady with a French numberplate went into a petrol station and filled her tank, and also bought 160 Euros' worth of cigarettes. Crazy!

I hadn't really had a chance to have a good look at Dinant. I figured we could take a quick photo and then leave. It turned out to be quite a nice place, and we stopped for a couple of hours in the town centre, with its jazz festival running:

Dinant town centre

After that we went back along the far side of the river, where we took some more photos of the sun setting on the rock formations:

Dinant's river in the afternoon

From there, we basically continued on the motorway for much of the way to the hotel. We knew before we arrived that it was a rather big facility, but we didn't appreciate how big - it's a functional conference centre with a church. There's paintings on the walls, and the floors squeak like a really old building.

From said hotel we'll head off to Aachen tomorrow. See you there!