Motorcycle Touring - Adventures in Luxembourg Part 6
Part 6 - Getting lost and getting wet… again!
In the last episode I talked about the trip over to the World War II museum in Bastogne, and the challenges of sticking together as a group when the roads are busy and you can’t stay within line of sight.
Now, continuing on from where I left off, we’ve all made our way into the museum carpark, have stashed helmets and are just about to head inside
It strikes me on the way to the entrance, that the whole building sits quite discreetly within the landscape of the surrounding parkland, in large measure because it’s half buried, almost as though the idea was to situate it in its own fox-hole.
The entrance is clearly visible, outside which there’s a big display space, which on this occasion features a collection of paintings created on sections of the Berlin wall.
Claire is a particular fan of David Bowie’s work, so grabs a snap of the painting featuring him and Iggy Pop.
Moving inside, the museum is modern and engaging, and positively awash with children, presumably on a school trip, but after paying the small entrance fee and picking up our audio guides, set to English, the well behaved youngsters are soon forgotten
Bastogne War Museum is unlike any that I’ve visited before. There’s a pre-planned route through the place, with countless audio guide segments in the voices of different characters, which provide information from interestingly different perspectives.
But to start, there’s a small lecture theatre type setup, which runs a quick ten minute presentation explaining a bit about the background to the war.
This is delivered in a pseudo war-room bunker, complete with war map. You have to wait to enter, as the door is closed while the show is on, effectively controlling the flow of people entering the exhibits, meaning once we’re in, we ran into little crowding.
With the intro over, we enter the exhibits proper, and here things are once again delivered very well.
Yes, there are the usual glass cabinets showing off genuine artefacts from the time, but there are also more robust items, tanks, anti-aircraft guns, cars, motorcycles, just on display in the aisles so you can touch and walk around them.
One thing I’ve never seen before, which they chose to do in this museum, is display war damaged vehicles, especially the tanks.
Seeing a tank with broken tracks, dents, fire damage and giant shell hole in its turret immediately grabs your attention. But getting to walk around that vehicle to see and feel the peeled back inches-thick armour plate, where the explosive shell has literally burst open a massive cavity on the other side… This isn’t glamorising war, or turning it into a computer game.
To anyone looking at that exhibit it was clear what would have happened to the soldiers inside that vehicle when it was hit. Thankfully the exhibit does provide that last detail.
There are more video’s and more war room briefings as you wander around the museum, but I’m not going to try and detail them all here.
Its worth noting though, that the exhibits aren’t limited to the building itself.
If you have more time than we did, then the grounds are also well worth an explore, both for the massive memorial to the American soldiers killed or injured in the battle, and more vehicle exhibits, including at least one plane, but also because of the woodland…
A patch of the nearby Jacques woodland, complete with fox-holes has been preserved within the grounds, and here you can use your phone and a QR code to view a re-enactment of the kind of foxhole woodland fighting that would have taken place all across this region.
Take a look at the museum website and you’ll see a clip of this on their front page.
Unfortunately, time was against us, so after grabbing a bite to eat in the bistro, we headed back to the bikes to try and track down some other tanks still on display across the Ardennes countryside.
We had the satnav route provided by MCI again as a guide, and this took us away from the museum via a back-road that lead through the neighbouring farm-land.
We’d spent a bit longer than planned in the museum, so we weren’t expecting to find all the tanks, but we were hopeful that we’d find at least half.
Of course, what we hadn’t bargained with, was the Ardennes countryside…
During World War II the Ardennes was famous for being the site of the last major offensive by the Axis forces, who attempted to force a truce out of the allies by pushing forward through the Ardennes in order to divide the allied forces, and make the progression of the war so costly, that a truce would be the only alternative.
And it nearly worked.
Known as the Battle of the Bulge, the countryside of the Ardennes proved a significant factor in both impeding the surprise German advance, and the subsequent Allied attempts at driving them back.
Now, I knew all this in theory, but riding a motorcycle around the Ardennes really brought it home to me, just how difficult this terrain would have been for any large military force to travel through.
Not that I have any knowledge of soldiering.
A few more photographs would probably have helped to explain what I mean, but I didn’t stop to take them when I should have. So apologies in advance.
We ride north from Bastogne, along small roads for a few minutes, and then spend the next hour on a mixture of slightly quicker, straighter roads, and smaller rambling country roads, getting caught out the by the turns, overshooting and having to turn around.
Many of the bigger roads in this region are lined on both sides by mature avenues of trees, often with part of their trunks painted white, presumably to make them more visible in poor weather.
But every time we stray from these tree-lined avenues we’re straight into farmland liberally interspersed with woodland, streams, gullies, not many bigger rivers, miles of hedgerows, small hamlets, and tiny roads that just don’t make sense to anyone who doesn’t live here, and certainly only bear a passing resemblance to maps on our satnavs.
Many a time we end up riding down one road only to discover is doesn’t go where we thought, and head back to the same junction to try a second or third option.
Thankfully, Claire has the written directions with her again, and by combining what’s written there with the satnav maps we somehow manage to find our way to our first tank… which is missing, off being re-painted apparently
Undaunted we ride on, and twenty minutes later, find our second landmark, a half destroyed Sherman which has been dubbed the Singapore Sling.
It’s another twenty minutes or so to the third tank on our list, surrounded by well kept flower beds as part of the local war memorial, in Malmedy… I think, but I’ve missed the sign on the way in, distracted by the rather pleasant looking cafe’s, that are thronged with people.
In the next town along, we think we’ve found where a Tiger tank, is supposed to be located, but we can’t find it, despite riding through the place four or five times.
Eventually, we give up and move on.
We spot a petrol station on the way out of town, so stop to fill up, and while we’re at it, notice that the clouds are looking rather dark to the south, the way we’ll need to go to get back to Vianden.
A quick chat over our comms, and we decide to try for one more tank, located just ten miles away, before starting back.
But ten miles in the Ardennes involves another handful of wrong turns, and if that weren’t enough to make us turn back, it starts to rain.
This isn’t the dark bank of cloud that still approaching from the south, this is just a heavy shower to encourage us to stop and put on the waterproofs.
None of us have full outfits, but we each have either over-trousers or over-jacket, and having learned our lesson on the way out, we quickly don what we’ve got to try and stay at least partly dry.
We’ve got about an hour of riding to get back to Vianden, and while the first shower passes within the few minutes, its wet enough at times to make reading the satnavs difficult. Interspersed with enough dry to partially dry us out, so we arrive back at the hotel, damp, but not completely soaked.
The weather isn’t nice enough to sit on the veranda for dinner this evening, so the hotel arranges tables inside instead, in our usual breakfast room.
I do most of my packing before heading down for dinner. so I can relax on our last night, and it seems everyone else has done something similar.
Of course, on our last evening together, the conversation naturally turns to whether we’ve enjoyed the holiday, and opinion is unanimous. Everyone has enjoyed the trip immensely, And that brings us almost to the end.
In the next and final episode, Part 7: Filtering through the heat! I’ll talk about the trip home via a well known motorcycle gear shop in Guildford, and how this adventure changed the way I think about things.