In May we headed to Germany for the Project Gutenburg Giga event. We were staying in Saarburg, Germany which is just on the outskirts of Luxembourg and ended up doing a fair bit of geocaching in Luxembourg instead of Germany because it was such a beautiful place. Definitely under rated! We found some fantastic caches and locations that I thought definitely needed to be shared…

Larochette

We headed to Larochette to pick up the Moai and Verluerekascht virtual caches, however, it was such a pretty town that we ended up making a day of our visit.

We kicked off at Chateau de Larochette where there was a cache of the same name. Here we found the remains of the castle that stood in place until the end of 16th century when it was destroyed by fire. It has been well restored though.

From the chateau we headed off to the Moai virtual, however, as we forgot to load paths on our GPS we ended up following some footpath signs and taking a rather unorthodox path to GZ only to bump into a group of really friendly Swedish cachers who told us they parked right next to GZ! Doh! They kindly took our photos for the cache requirements.

After finding the Moai we pottered around Larochette picking up the odd cache and admiring the views before heading up to find the second virtual, Verluerekascht. For this one we had to visit two waypoints. The first was the tower on the other side of the valley. A steep climb got us to that point.

The second was a Rock on the other side of town which was again quite a steep climb. From the top we were able to see the chateau, tower and find a multicache!

At the chateau was a big information board about “Little Switzerland” in Luxembourg and the beautiful locations that you could visit. There were some very interesting spots so we bookmarked them in our minds for our second day in Luxembourg.

Beaufort/Berdorf area

Our research on “Little Switzerland” had us looking in the area of ‘Berdorf’ where I’d spotted a cache with lots of fave points on it called ‘Rock labyrinths’. I was intrigued! So we headed to that area and ended up targeting caches with high favourite points. It turned out to be a fantastic way to plan the day! :D

We started off with a few drive by caches on our way to the area. We stopped at Isfyd which turned out to be a 3.5T. After a short search we realised why as it was hidden in a drainage tunnel under the road! I was ready to dismiss it and head off, but Yorkie63 still wanted to do it. Now, I like being underground but I’m just not a drainage tunnel kinda gal! ;) Plus I wasn’t prepared. That didn’t stop Yorkie63 though and he stripped off and headed inside! Lol!

Once Yorkie63 had dried off we headed to the Houllay – Hohlfels eartcache, which with 106 favourite points looked pretty good! :D

The earthcache was placed because of the caves in the area. On parking up for the cache we noticed lots of trucks for film crews. We approached GZ and there was scaffolding and plastic sheets around the caves and inside of them were props and film sets! We explored the area, but unfortunately the filming prevented us from having a good look at the caves and we did struggle a bit to get the answers for the earth cache. It’s definitely somewhere I’d like to visit again to see the caves in all of their glory. Apparently they were filming a Peter Pan movie there which looks to be this one.

Our next stop was The secret place. It sounded intriguing! We didn’t really know what to expect, but it was a T4 terrain so we were guessing rocks and a cave! We were right, but finding the route to the cave was the tricky one. We all clambered down the hillside with Yorkie63 heading off in another direction to see what he could find. We turned up empty handed, but later on heard a shout from him that he had found a cave. We clambered back up the bank and looped around the top of the rocks to try and find a way down to him, but it was extremely steep and dangerous. We could see down into the cave and spoke to him while he was searching. It was a long search. We kept shouting down the hint and recent logs to him, but the cache wasn’t revealing itself. A good 15 minutes of searching continued before he exclaimed that he’d found it! We could see him with the cache from above!

The long search had been caused by a previous finder putting the cache back the wrong way round. A reflector was meant to be visible so that torch light could hit it and it would be obvious which explained a lot of logs saying it was an easy find once in the cave!!!

Our next stop was The bridge and the water which was again a T4. This one was a lot easier as we had Andy, the human stepladder, with us so Yorkie63 was able to climb him to get up to the ledge where the cache was! Lol!

The next cache for our adventure was Rock Labyrinths, which was the main cache that we had actually come for before getting distracted by all of the others! :) This was great fun! Lots of high rocks with narrow walkways. Eventually we meandered through them to GZ.

It was getting late, but we were having so much fun! :D We spotted some caches on the GPS that had nearly 300 favourite points so we would have been fools to leave them!

Our first stop was Räuberhöhle. We followed a very well walked path through a woods.

The GPS was a little bit muddled, but the cache description told us “Enter behind the “S” and search behind the large triangular stone.”. Yorkie63 and MummaD went off exploring near where the GPS was taking us, but me and Andy spotted an opening to a cave that looked promising, but we couldn’t find the “S”. We entered anyway and very shortly were at the back of the cave where I spotted a large triangular stone. I clambered up and we were rewarded with the cache! Woohoo! We shouted for Yorkie63 and MummaD to come and join us. Fantastic cache!

Our next stop was Reiberhiel. It was quite a hilly area and we clambered down a huge set of steps down to where the GPS was taking us. We were amazed when we reached the cave entrance. It was well marked and inside were metal ladders so that you could climb down. We were quite suprised that people were actually being encouraged to explore. In the UK this sort of cave would have been gated off and covered with health and safety signs! Lol!

We clambered down the first ladder and then down the second one. The cache itself was a very quick find as some reflective eyes marked the cache. After that it was a clamber up some rocks to get to the cache and we soon had it in hand!

Our final cave cache was Hölle which was very close to Reiberhiel. We followed a path through another rock labyrinth and eventually after taking a really dodgy route down we were at the cave entrance.

The cave was quite tight and then we had to climb over some rocks as we followed reflectors to GZ. Eventually we were there!

After our caving we headed to the top of the hill where the sun was just going down. There were some really beautiful views!

Our reward for our hard day’s caching was a big meal at the first restaurant we got to! We expected everything to be closed, but not only did we manage to get food, it was fantastic food!

Luxembourg really did surpass our expectations. It was an amazing place and there are still loads of chateaus and tourist spots for us to visit. I’m really hoping we can go back soon for some more adventures.