Attempting to explore all of Germany in a little over two weeks would be both foolish and quite impossible. We didn’t even bother. The south-eastern state of Bavaria, despite being Germany’s largest, would be just about manageable if we kept our wiener stops and bratwurst breaks to a minimum while being extremely selective in our choice of picture-perfect villages to besmirch with our presence.
You rejoin us following an extremely restless night on the outskirts of Schaan, Liechtenstein’s most populous municipality, trying and failing to collect countless drips from our increasingly leaky ceiling. Thankfully, the rainstorm we had endured since entering the country had temporarily ceased and we were finally able to inspect the damage thanks to our ingenious portable ladder we had stashed away for just such events.
While I love a micronation perhaps more than the next man, the prospect of touring the diminutive country of Liechtenstein filled me with even more wonder than usual as she is, without a doubt, the European nation I know the least about and, therefore, the most mysterious.
Having dipped our frigid toes into the fondue of Swiss life in our first week proceeding across the undulating north, we were now fully equipped to take on the challenges and enormous heights of Switzerland’s Alpine south.
At the commencement of our jaunt around Central Europe, if you had asked us which country, we were most looking forward to exploring it would have comfortably been Switzerland. With such lofty expectations, we made a swift beeline from our previous nation of Luxembourg, through a great swathe of Western France and the cities of Metz, Nancy, and Mulhouse to arrive at the gateway to the Alps in the city of Basel.
You rejoin us after an almighty night of birthday boozing in the Luxembourger capital: Luxembourg City. Although, not even the sorest of heads could fail to appreciate the spectacular city scenery that greeted us from our lofty Airbnb balcony the following morning.
While bouncing from Belgian bar to Belgian brewery slurping on craft beer was immensely pleasurable, nothing quite hits like visiting a new micronation. Discovering how they’ve managed to maintain their independence throughout the centuries is always a fascinating lesson in the trading of land as well as savvy leadership and Luxembourg is no different.
We arose on the outskirts of the Belgian capital in fine spirits given the remarkably clear blue sky that greeted us, a novelty for the trip thus far, and in great anticipation for a city neither of us had set foot in before.
Following our introduction to Belgium in Baarle-Hertog, the town known for its notoriously complex hotchpotch of borders with The Netherlands, we skipped across Northern Belgium past the port behemoth that is Antwerp and arrived in the more picturesque Bruges.
After a week spent acclimatising and familiarising ourselves with the Dutch way of life, which involved a lot of vertical smock windmills and vegan soused herring, we decided to dive into the beating heart and capital of the country: Amsterdam. I say dive, we parked about as far away from the centre as was still practically commutable in order to avoid unwittingly navigating into a canal or getting stranded in the Red-Light District with no method of extraction, for that would be a disaster.
