Day 1: Maastricht

 We left daughter-in-law’s house yesterday at about 1230. It is a 2 Hour Dr. from her place to Maastricht, mostly on boring freeway. We settled into a campground just short of Maastricht for the night. There are generally two kinds of campgrounds in Europe. One is pretty nice well serviced private campgrounds but pretty expensive, usually as much as €25-€30. The other type is small municipal “parking” Which can be free or usually less than 10 hero. This one is kind of halfway in between and cost €17 per night.

This morning we bicycled into Maastricht For a very delightful day. We have been here before, but this time we discovered a whole new part of town it was very interesting. We walked across the river Meuze which we hadn’t even seen last time we came here. We discovered that on the other side of the river is the older part of town with many small buildings of as early as the 1600s and 1700s, mostly now interesting art galleries shops and boutiques. Continuing around a few corners we came to a very interesting modern building called the ceramic center. This was an example of what we call our serendipity experiences. Those who have followed previous blogs know that we have what we call our Serindipity bunny that occasionally finds us wonderful sites that we did not at all expect.  It turned out that this ceramic centre was mostly a library attached to a school of art. There was a marvellous photography exhibit on the main floor, and the next three floors up was the library, Where students were working hard in their cubicles but surrounded by displays of ceramics, mostly historic and archeological such as a Japanese exhibit and exhibitions of Roman excavations from Roman era in Maastricht.

Of course being our first day, we had to have morning coffee in one of the charming cafés, and lunch at another charming café somewhat later. Pat was wanting to go to the Maastricht caves in the afternoon, which was about a 20 minute bicycle ride south of town and up on a bit of a hill. The caves offer a tour of the many kilometres of underground tunnels and caves created over the centuries by miners digging rock for building the walls and buildings of the town. The one hour tour, totally underground and in the dark but for our flashlights , was an amazing insight into the underground life of the workers, and during the second world war, of the towns people who took shelter there.

It was late afternoon by the time we finished the tour, so we bicycles back to a brewery near the town centre in the old part of town. As we approached, we found another serendipity. It turned out that there was a bluegrass band playing at this brewery that we planned to go to. It was quite packed on the small outdoor patio area, with some very snappily dressed towns people. For some reason this brewery patio attracted what appeared to be young business people dressed very fashionably, mostly with the modern slicked down haircuts and carefully coiffed facial hair. They were offering by way of food, pulled pork sandwiches which we enjoyed with the fresh local brew.

By this time our legs and feet were quite exhausted from both the bicycling and the kilometres of walking for the day so back to the campsite by about 630 for a cup of tea and to bed.

Tomorrow we will head a little further south to end up in Libra Mont by Saturday where there happens to be a classic car show. What a surprise. To be continued…