Nut Shots

<<Thanks to Sara for taking most of the pics this weekend>>

Headed we headed up to Vianden a few weeks ago for their annual Nut Fest or more properly Fete du Noix.
Vianden is about an hour or so by car to the northwest of Luxembourg City Center (which I'm now going to refer to as the city for the sake of brevity). It sits on the Our River and is next to the German boarder. The countryside to and from and around Vianden is glorious...they just don't have farms/ranches and rolling hills like this in America, or if they do, I haven't seen them yet.

Our first view of Vianden was spectacular as we parked well above the town and walked down into the crowds more eager for nuts than Clinton interns. Anyway, here's what we saw when we got out of the car and looked down into town....not a bad shot of Castle Vianden, one of the most amazing places I've ever seen and my first "real' castle spotting.

The castle was built atop Roman forts and evolved from a small chapel to larger and larger outbuildings that over the centuries became the full castle (similar what I'm doing with my beer/F.S. gut....slowly growing it over time into something monumental....it takes time, people... foresight, stick-to-it'ed-ness, admittedly a degree of laziness, and a staunch love of F.S.)

We descended into town following our friends Les and Nuria and their son Elliot by following our pattern of latching on to more organized people who know what they're doing and where to go. (thanks again, guys). We entered the stream of people jostling over each other for fresh walnuts, walnut wine, walnut booze, beer and loads of F.S. and other festival food dirtyness. It was heaven. I love the smell of F.S. in the morning. I had several. Here's a shot of us enjoying one of them...

We tried a shot of some walnut wine and it was superb--tasted like port. So we had to buy a bottle. Just might crack it open tonight. We passed a classic butcher shop while wandering through town and had to get a shot of Rudy in his element -- he loves everything sausage as much as his dad does. We share genes that is no lie.

Got a few more shots of town from some different angles. Here's a shot of Mom and Roo looking back up at the Castle Vianden from below.

We also ran into friends Troy and Daniela and their kids at the Nut Fest and sat down with them for a beer and sausage before departing. Troy is an author and I'm currently reading his book Karoo Boy. It's a good one and comes highly recommended from us both.

One final tidbit re: the town is that Victor Hugo used to like to hang out here. Word on the street is that the Hunchback of Notre-Dame was based on a story about a handsome sausage-maker from Vianden who was horribly disfigured when the chapel's churchbell broke from it's anchors and tumbled down through the village square straight into his sausage shop. At that moment he was in the process of cooking several large cauldrons of sausage for the wedding of the Duke's nephew, Peter the Meek. When the bell smashed through his front window and into the shop, he was scalded about head, neck, chest and face area with boiling sausage water. With terrible facial burns and a severely altered gait, he retreated to the church to ring bells for the rest of his life as he saw it as his penance, for on the day of his disfigurement, he had snatched his neighbor's cat and added it to sausage mix. He did not need the extra meat, nor the mild and then very much appreciated feline flavoring it would add, but instead did it to spite his neighbor who had done nothing for weeks as the sausage-maker complained that her wretched cat was using his open flour sacks its personal litter boxes. Betcha didn't know that.