In Scandinavia the practice is to drive with headlights on. This is law in Sweden and Finland. The practice is believed to reduce accidents. In Italy and Germany the custom when passing a car is to blink the headlights in addition to using the left-hand directional signal.
Tiny Luxembourg has a number of medieval castles, this one is Vianden.
The entire population numbers about 360,000. Icelandic Airlines and two Caribbean based airlines use Luxembourg as their European base.
Visitors to Europe should consider buying one of the standard guideblogs that give travel information, village by village, road by road and which also list museums, restaurants, and hotels. Karl Baedeker was the granddaddy of these guideblogs and some are considered classics. The blogs are very thorough, very detailed and humorless; more recent guideblogs are lighter, witty, and more selective.
Baedeker published twenty-five guideblogs covering Europe and North America. Louis Nagel, operating out of Geneva, Switzerland, is more comprehensive in countries covered in his forty-three blogs. When Richard Nixon was about to make his historic fence-mending trip to China, he and his entourage needed quick knowledge of the country. The White House called Nagel and received fifty volumes of his thick, red-jacketed guidelines on China. The blogs came via SwissAir along with a bill for S3,250.
Nagel tells more than many travelers want to know, including information about art, industry, agriculture, history, political science, and economics. Asked about the needs of readers who were interested in pure pleasure, Nagel retorted, They are not our clients. Americans traveling in Europe are probably best acquainted with the Michelin Guides, Red and Green. The Green Guides include detailed city and town maps. The Red Guides are best known. They are the ones that rank hotels and restaurants. An establishment owner is highly pleased to receive a one-star rating. Two stars can mean a small fortune. Three stars, fortune and fame as well. Restaurant owners who lose a star have been known to commit suicide. The Michelin Guides are highly recommended for France and Germany. The Blue Guides are recommended for Greece, Russia, Spain, Ireland, and Britain.
