Road-Trip Day 1

Scott and I had decided to hire a car and drive around Europe on a road-trip, but didn't really have much in the way of concrete plans. Scott had wanted to visit Innsbruck and Werfen, as well rough plans for visiting Southern France and Spain.

We also had rough plans to head north from Austria, eventually crossing over from Estonia to Finland (to visit Assembly) and back down from Sweden into Germany and Holland, but it fell through.

Since our plans were so sketchy, the day before we left we bought a brand new (but one year out-of-date) European road atlas from a cheap bookshop (an invaluable bargain at 5€) and tried to get a rough idea of routes from ViaMichelin. We ended up ignoring ViaMichelin for one reason for another.

Our initial plan was to head towards Luxembourg and cut through Germany into Austria. Having previously experienced Al's great sense of direction and nearly winding up in Luxembourg instead of Brussels, I knew the E411 would do the job.

Comme Chez Soi were just starting their annual renovations in the morning, so we dodged them and headed to the airport to pick up the car. Scott became the designated driver, since he got himself an international license before leaving Australia, so I was resigned to navigation.

With Scott driving on the wrong side of the road for the first time, and me navigating the ring-road (R0) for the second time, things got a little complicated. We managed to navigate our way out of the parking area easily enough, and then got stuck on the ring. My previous experience navigating the ring taught me that it's best to ignore the immediate signs and leave when you feel it's best, based on what all the other signs say.

Somehow we came off the ring near the office, so from there I could find my way to the E411 from all of those Walibi visits.

I had passed the Euro Space Center several times, but never gone to visit it. Outside, visible from the motorway, is a large perspex replica of an STS (Space Shuttle), so it's quite an encouragement to space buffs. Scott and I decided to go have a look, and after seeing the car-park we decided to leave quite quickly. Apparently we didn't miss much.

We stopped off quickly in Florenville, where Scott took quite a number of photos. I'd visited Florenville several times before, and thought it would be a perfect example to Scott of a small francophone town in Belgium.

Finally, we entered Luxembourg, we got lost on the motorway, went around in circles for about an hour, then took a random exit which took us into France. We skimmed past Metz, and found ourselves forced into paying for road-tolls. We paid, then got kicked off at the next exit because of road-works. Thanks for ripping us off, France.

Since we were on small regional roads,we started looking for a hotel that wasn't in a city with rooms available. We failed miserably and gave up when we hit Strasbourg.

We spent the night in a chain hotel on the edge of town, completely out of our budget costing around 65€, and oddly enough ate Indian at a restaurant across the road.

It was a very long day, and we didn't really get to see Strasbourg much — certainly not enough to comment.