Off We Go Into The Wild Blue Yonder

 How many chances do you get to go to Luxembourg? Luxembourg is a Grand Duchy, the only one remaining in Europe. It is the seventh smallest and the least populated European country. Luxembourg may be small, but it is mighty. It is one of the richest countries in the world.

I'm doing another river cruise on AmaWaterways with my brother and sister-in-law, Michael and Marina. It sails from Luxembourg to Nuremberg and we are going to spend a few extra days in both Luxembourg and Nuremberg.

Luxembourg is really clean, the ground is clean, the buses are clean and the people seem clean. One of the amazing things that Luxembourg has done is made all of their public transportation free. The idea is that if it is free, people would use it more and not use their cars as much. Our hotel, Hotel Gruber was a little over an hour from the airport in Steinheim and once we figured out the bus schedules, we were able to navigate all the way to the hotel. Taking a taxi would have cost us about $150. (Euros and dollars were pretty close in value.) 

Marina's mother was born in Germany and some of her cousins still live there. Lothar and his wife Corolla came to visit with us from Mannheim, Germany and stayed for a couple of days. Nice, nice people. There was lots of good food and massive amounts of wine. They had a car and decided to show us the sites.  

Hotel Gruber dining room

Our hotel was right on the banks of the Sûre (pronounced Sour) River.  Right across the river from us was Germany.  

Standng in Luxembourg, looking at Germany.  All along the rivers, there were campgrounds. 
Much smaller rigs than we see in the USofA

They first took us to an open-air Dinosaur Park. This is how you probably imagine it – many fiberglass statues of dinosaurs along with plaques with descriptions. After a while, I started realizing my knowledge of dinosaurs was perhaps a little bit limited. There started to be more and more of them that I didn't know. It took me a while to figure out that while they had many of the more common dinosaurs displayed, they might have also displayed some that were very very rare, as in I do believe they have been spoofing us.

I didn't know that Brontosauras were so nimble

This one was sort of creepy

This one was sort of cute

Lots of fun ones for the kids

Brother Mike seemed to fit right in

I found this one fascinating
Read the fine print to learn about the Desert Hopper

And look how cute these little Desert Hoppers were