Maastricht
Jul. 5th, 2025 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
After my day in Aachen I took a short train ride to Maastrict and spent most of a day there. It's odd, insomuch as it's a Dutch city with hills... it has some interesting historical churches, city walls, etc., and was generally nice to wander through as the temperature had dropped from the >35C of recent times to the mid-20s.
I took a tour of the "caves" - actually old limestone mines - a couple of km out of town. It turns out there is a huge network of these tunnels - thousands of miles in total - that extend not just under a hill outside Maastrict but all the way under the border to Belgium. They've been used for smuggling people or things under the border at various times in history - apparnetly the Belgian resistance made especially good use. Looking at the map, it mostly made me think of the Tombs of Atuan.

I posted some more phonecam photos over on Pixelfed: 1 2
Heading home now after a couple of days with Dutch-resident friends; I'm writing this from the Aberdeen->Kirkwall ferry.
I took a tour of the "caves" - actually old limestone mines - a couple of km out of town. It turns out there is a huge network of these tunnels - thousands of miles in total - that extend not just under a hill outside Maastrict but all the way under the border to Belgium. They've been used for smuggling people or things under the border at various times in history - apparnetly the Belgian resistance made especially good use. Looking at the map, it mostly made me think of the Tombs of Atuan.

I posted some more phonecam photos over on Pixelfed: 1 2
Heading home now after a couple of days with Dutch-resident friends; I'm writing this from the Aberdeen->Kirkwall ferry.