Welcome to my blog. I document my adventures in travel, style, and food. Hope you have a nice stay!
All tagged beertrip
We sipped our meals to their frothy conclusion and returned to the present, outside the gates of Weyermann. Looking back at the towering brick buildings, a sense of fantasy and mystery cropped up in my imagination, and I felt the only thing missing was a golden ticket.
Spring written in bold, underlined, all-capped looks limp compared to European reality this year. Pines bobbed and oaks shuddered with the passing wind, shaking yesterday’s rain; in amphibian metamorphosis, their buds grew visibly larger each passing day under the lengthening light of mid-Spring. Afar, the blooming color powdered the landscape in an Impressionistic blur. But up close, driving along hairpins and welcomed straightaways, the sun lucidly explained the detailed edges and specks and differences. Like a solar eclipse, the leaves bent the ecclesiastic power of the sun and left nothing but a blindingly white, broken trace at its perimeter; that remaining light still managed to draw my moving penumbra against the asphalt winding the Walloon wilderness en route to Durbuy.
Friday the 13th started with vegan breakfast and a morning read by the fire. I reviewed the beer lineup and synopsis for La Rulles - the brewery visit for the day - between a few current events (or, more accurately, “The Real World: Real World Edition”). Located in the Gaume region of Southeast Belgium, near the Semois River winding westward towards Bouillon and Godfrey’s castle, the brewery habituates a unique microclimate, always a few degrees Celsius warmer than the surrounding Ardennes hills. The quaint Belgian countryside, eleven in the morning, left two American wanders in silence.
I sometimes see the signs of Spring: the pollenated ground; a lonely green leaf on a tree; flapping wings of birds building nests; tadpoles congregating in illusions across a pond. Winding downhill in a maturing canopy of foliage, I downshifted to cut the personal effort, passing the burden down the line and straight to the transmission. Far south in the Luxembourg Province of Wallonia, just north of the French border, forest yields to field. Brown sheep sporting dreadlocks chomped the young, short grass situated within ancient and sturdy polished stone walls. Ochre colored sandstone, the “pierre de France,” rose from the grass in walls, belfries, and arched sally ports. Vines climbed in symmetry on the walls of an old guesthouse. In the background flashes of red maple buds added to the palette as the Spring day fought vestiges of Winter. A trout, lips pursed upon a golden ring, embossed the keystone of the entryway arch leading to Orval Monastery.
The wide open landscapes of Chilean Patagonia beckoned us from Argentina. In the wild but within city limits we looked forward to quieter nights with fewer street lights. Our friend Tony claimed since last July that he planned to meet up in Patagonia; despite his commitment and persistence, his appearance in the flesh at the Bariloche airport still surprised us. The airline losing his bags and not ours came as no surprise: an indoctrination into the chaos and unpredictability rampant south of the border. We thought Murphy, already exhausted with us, had moved onto Tony. That hypothesis proved very wrong. If only the Universe was so logical, life could be more predictable; but alas, it is not; and, instead, we get excitement, confusion, pain, and the promise of discovery. We certainly got more than we bargained for in Patagonia and became increasingly aware of our infinitely small part in it. At some point, coming to this realization, you begin to roll with the punches. I’m always surprised how short term this knowledge proves to be and how quickly you go back to controlling.
