Mosel Valley, Ardennes again & Flanders
23 & 24 September
To misquote Thomas Gray, the way home starts by slowly wending through the Mosel Valley’s Weinstraß, an eighty-mile meander, tracing the route of the river cut from a limestone gorge over the last 50 million years.
It’s only slow-going through the numerous, schoen towns on the banks. A later squint at the Michelin guide confirms an abundance of addresses to stay and eat well. Aim for one of these places, midway between Trier and the dreary Koblenz, when going in either direction.
A recent edition of Bike Magazine, dedicated to curvy roads in the UK and abroad, suggested a few roads in Northern Luxembourg so I veered off for a look. They’re an entertaining alternative to the motorway if, like me, you're heading towards the Ardennes with all day to get there.
Given the editorial focus on bendy roads, I’m not sure how they failed to give the Route de Bastoigne a mention. I can’t think of a better series of insane, high-speed curves anywhere in mainland Europe. It might be all too brief at under ten miles, but it’s bookended by the Bike routes at one end and Belgium’s excellent network of interesting thoroughfares at the other. So worth seeking out.
Our first visit to the Hotel Des Ardennes was 20 years ago. An occasion when the sommelier shook his head sorrowfully at the epic volumes of wine the three of us consumed with our elegant dinner, before returning to the bar for a cleansing Godfroy beer or four.
These days, he is still there but in a less arduous role - more ambassadorial than operative - and it suits him well. He has aged gracefully and has been there every time I’ve visited since, always giving me a nod and barely perceptible smirk and smile.
Behaviour and alcohol consumption levels might change with age but the Hotel Des Ardennes remains exactly as it was. On a Sunday, Monday or Tuesday only a fixed-prix, no-choice dinner menu is available but it’s great value at €45. The menus get more opulent and pricey if you visit on the other days of the week but they stick to the classics: Foie Gras, Dover Sole, Lamb, Beef, Venison, Veal followed by a flouncy dessert and optional cheese course. Bloody brilliant it is too and regardless of the day, the hotel is a model of restrained elegance and peacefulness. While not a budget choice, the €200 or so for dinner, drinks, single-room, bed and breakfast represents value compared to the €150 even a skinflint would probably spend for a vastly inferior night in this region.
On that first visit in 2004, was a young man working in the dining room. He is now 42, and has become the fourth generation of the Maqua family to run the hotel. They’ve been in the Michelin guide for 33 years, longer than any other establishment in Belgium.
We met an elderly English couple there a few years ago. He, a retired architect and she, still working as a travel and food writer. They were touring in one of those late-model Rovers that tried to look like a Bentley and carried a distinct, Downton-Abbey-extra demeanour with them.
They urged us to keep the identity of the hotel quiet. This is where they came to relax and spend their own money after the sybaritic excesses that came with the turf as a journalist with a public profile. Now there’s a high-class problem, if ever there was one. I suspect they are both now late-of-this-parish and so humbly beg their forgiveness for blabbing about the Hotel Des Ardennes. There: said it and will say it again: Hotel Des Ardennes in Corbion-sur-Semois. Don’t get pissed before, during and after dinner though. Poor form…
Grey skies and wet roads the day after, on the way to Ypres, is time to reflect on the last fourteen days and 40 years. The conclusion is inescapable: the continent has got old, and so have I.
It’s also got busy and the two observations are not unrelated. Twenty years ago, there was a sense of freedom and space in Europe but this space has now become full of old people. Like me…
The demographic tragedy that has befallen the whole of Europe is that the only people with any money are mainly old. We grumpily travel outside school holidays to avoid hordes of motorhomes, full of wholesome-looking Dutch parents and their fresh-faced progeny. Wailing the whole time about how grey the world has become.
In my case, I’m one of the thousands of ageing bikers, trying to overtake ageing German Mittlere Führungskräfte, their bony fingers, grimly clutching the steering wheel of a 2003 Mercedes E-Klasse, no doubt part of an early retirement package and clung onto since, a leitmotif of diminished status and power.
This year, I feel it particularly keenly having recently returned from a never-to-be-repeated, life-affirming 16,500 mile odyssey around North America. Travelling mainly solo there meant I met a varied cast of characters. The majority were mainstream Americans but adult film performers, retired cannabis growers, cult members and political obsessives popped up. All confirmed my preconception that the USA is the most open and welcoming place on Earth. It also helped that they all spoke English, or at least a version of it I could understand. This is a dimension I miss in Europe as a consequence of my shameful language skills.
Inevitably Europe now seems quite small, a little crowded and over-regulated. Now clearly, it’s the same size geographically as it’s always been so this perception is relative to the USA. And I can hardly complain about it seeming crowded as I’m part of the problem.
The regulation is another matter and has got dramatically worse, post-pandemic with all manner of petty regulations and surveillance being introduced since as a result of the ongoing, meddling, bureaucratic overreach.
Regardless, France, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Italy - Old Europe - they’re all part of a glorious patchwork of memories that stretch back to 1985. Three of us, sitting in the back of the car, with my friends’ parents upfront, listening to a home-taped TDK Super Avilyn cassette of two albums that were everywhere that summer. Dire Straits’ ‘Brothers in Arms’ on one side; Sting’s ‘Dream of the Blue Turtles’ on the other. Looking out of the window, idly wondering what the next forty years might bring. Well, now I know and I’m profoundly grateful for what has played out, albeit mindful of the friends, time and future lost along the way.
And there are few better places than Ypres to reflect on the good fortune to be born in Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth-century. The Saint Arnoldus beer bar is a few yards from the Menin Gate. It has outside tables at which to sit and sip a 7.5% ‘Tripel’ and gaze at the memorial, albeit currently undergoing restoration.
At the eastern edge of this beautifully restored town, the site was chosen as hundreds of thousands of men passed this point on their way to the battlefields. The memorial bears the names of more than 54,000 officers and men whose graves are not known. Men never protected with cradle-to-grave health care, whose potential was never realised through free education to degree level, who never revelled in the fastest-growth in living standards in recorded history. Men who took up arms without question when it was demanded of them and did so again, a mere twelve years after the Menin Gate was completed. The lasting legacy and proof that - whatever its failings, but measured against original objectives - the EU was and remains a spectacular success. Somehow, European countries on both sides of these two conflicts have managed to provide the foundations of prosperity and lived in peace since. An enduring exemplar of secular, capitalist democracy. And to those who blithely assert that “This would have happened anyway”: five hundred years of history tend to suggest otherwise.
So of course, I’ll go back to these great countries. Again and again. But with a different purpose and a recalibrated set of expectations for what they are now rather than what they were then.
But there is still much to explore and now, much more time to do it in. The remoter parts of Spain and Portugal are an obvious choice. Eastern and South-Eastern Europe (can’t call it The Balkans any more… not PC…) are another. Northern Europe, for the reasons mentioned. And Greece is totally uncharted for me…
It has to be done. After all, the future isn’t what it used to be.
PS: Most of the photos on this post date from that original tour in 2004. The weather was better back then…