Maastricht and Valkenburg

Marc here (I love ice cream).




















Karla and I got a chance to get away for 2 days while my parents were visiting. We drove 1.5hrs to Maastricht, and spent our time at a spa hotel in Valkenburg. The weather was beautiful (20~23 degrees and blue skies/sunny) and Maastricht is a beautiful, diverse city. It's in the Netherlands technically, but it's surrounded by Belgium and Germany.
We ate ice cream, shopped a cool flea market (and bought some antiques that made Karla's day), dodged bicycles in cobbledstones pedestrian areas, enjoyed the river Maas, and the usual 12th century Romanesque Basilica that you find in all nice European towns :)






















Valkenburg is mostly known for some castle ruins "the only castle in the Netherlands that's built on a hill", according to the tourist information. It turns out that it's also the only hill in the Netherlands :)

Underneath the castle hill, there is 800 years of limestone quarrying history (to build the castle and surrounding village). The resulting caves became a kind of tourist attraction in the 1800s, and were decorated with a whole series of carvings - they have also housed clergy escaping persecution in the 1700s, and more recently over 600 villagers for 6 days during the liberation of Valkenburg in 1945. There is graffiti spanning hundreds of years, including a series of profiles of American soldiers (and signatures, rank, and home city info). On a sad note, in 1993, two boys got into the caves somehow (they've tried to lock down every entrance), and were unable to find their way out :(
In one section of the caves, you can see where the limestone quarry intersected a well from the castle above - it's amazing to see how deep inside the hill you are you actually standing, when you look up the well shaft (and then down, even further). Good times!