2010-07-19

shewhomust: (bibendum)
2010-07-19 09:46 pm
Entry tags:

Maastricht in pictures

I'm still working my way through the photos I took on our trip along the Meuse in autumn 2008. Sometimes it has seemed that I am never going to catch up with myself, that I will always be distracted by more travels, more photos - and very agreeably distracted, too. Nonetheless, I aim to sort my photos, post the best of them to Flickr, transcribe my jottings into some sort of holiday posts. And yesterday I actually reached the end of the photographs I had taken during our day in Maastricht.

It was my sister-in-law, GirlBear, who originally suggested Maastricht as a town on the Meuse (or Maas, at this point) worth visiting: increasingly, my default strategy is to avoid large towns. And it was [livejournal.com profile] durham_rambler's brother, dcweather, who mentioned Valkenburg as somewhere he had once stayed on a school trip. Add to this the guide book I found in the library, which recommended a route through Limburg, and it all came together very neatly. We found ourselves a hotel in Valkenburg, booked ourselves in for two nights, and spent the intervening day exploring Maastricht.

The centre of Maastricht is small, and completely charming. We found reasonably central and reasonably affordable parking (though with hindsight, we'd have done better to take the bus) and followed our noses through the old streets until we found the tourist office, where we bought a map with recommended walking tour. City walls, arcaded streets, sculpted decorations on house frontages, autumn leaves everywhere, it's all in the details. If you're interested, have a look at the pictures.

At first I thought I wouldn't - couldn't - choose just one picture to represent a day in the city, and then I opened the notebook in which the enire day is summarised as "A day in Maastricht - where the cyclists take no prisoners," - so it had to be this one:

How many bicycles?