Aachen; Sunday, 30 August, 2020

I actually managed to get a bit of a lie-in this morning – with no dawn chorus of bells filling my room at an ungodly hour. After a decent breakfast – a proper buffet, albeit socially distanced – I headed out of the hotel and over to my reserved slot at the Couven Museum. I’d booked online a few days beforehand to ensure I was able to visit with a timed slot – I needn’t have bothered as there was a 6 to 1 staff to visitor ratio with me being sole visitor looking round the museum.

Having taken in the museum I went for a wander around the centre of town, which on a Sunday morning was almost completely deserted. Too early for the day trippers from Cologne probably! I stopped off at St Foillan’s Church. The building has clearly been rebuilt over a number of times with modern thin concrete and steel pillars holding up the ceiling, whilst surrounded by original medieval masonry work.

From the church I wandered up through town to the Hauptbahnhof to pick up the train over to the next big town – Stolberg. The town sits on a small river with a large hill rising in the centre on which, of course, they built a castle. And what a castle – turrets, round towers, gatehouses and every upper wall crenelated – it’s the textbook exemplar of a castle. Today, most of the castle is a restaurant and events business, but on days when they don’t have parts of the castle being used for weddings you can walk round a few of the rooms and part of one tower.

After looking round the castle I had a bit of a wander round the rest of the town before heading over to the bus station and picking up the bus part way back to Aachen. In the suburb of Brand, I changed buses onto the bus to Monschau, an even prettier German fairy-tale village nestled in a gorge with, you’ve guessed it a large castle on the top of the ridge.

The journey between Brand and Monschau is also interesting for it’s geopolitics with the bus crossing back and forth between Germany and Belgium. An old railway line ended up in the possession of the Belgium state following the first world war with all the structures and route line becoming Belgium territory, even though in places they were several miles inside Germany. The survived into the 21st century but was closed by 2007 with the tracks and stations long gone, but the territory remaining part of Belgium. Consequently, each time the former line crosses the road you technically enter Belgium for the width of a railway line before re-entering Germany.

At any other time this would be a good enough excuse as any to hop off the bus and spend a few minutes hopping between countries, but this is August 2020 and Germany is on the UK’s green list of countries you can happily visit without needing to quarantine on return. Belgium on the other hand is a long way down the red list of countries, and if I had hopped out it would have meant 14 days self-isolation on return to the UK. Instead I remained on the bus and continued to the end of the line in Monschau.

From the bus stop I headed up hill towards the castle that stands high above the valley floor and towers over the town below. It was a pretty hefty walk up the hill, only to be met by disappointment when I got to the top to find that the castle itself is currently closed for renovation works. After having a little look around the outer parts of the castle that were open, I found a staircase that led back down into the centre of town.

I had a long wander through the tiny lanes of Monschau and through the picturesque squares. I eventually found my way to the Old Market square where I stopped briefly for a quick bite to eat and a drink before it was time to start wandering back to the bus stop and to catch my bus all the way back to the centre of Aachen.

The bus took the same route back towards Aachen with the multiple border crossings, each time holding my breath that the otherwise mechanically sound bus did not suddenly breakdown whilst in Belgium. Thankfully, it didn’t and we were soon heading further into Germany and towards Aachen, with the skies rapidly darkening. On the outskirts of the city the drizzle started, that by the time I reached the centre was a full-on torrential downpour.

Thankfully, the bus stopped only a few yards from my hotel, so I managed to avoid getting totally soaked, but it was clear that the rain was settling in for the night. I was glad I’d had the big breakfast and the reasonable snack in Monschau as there was no way I was venturing back out into that weather, instead I grabbed a snack from the room-service menu before eventually heading for an early night with the rain still pounding at the windows