Episode 3 · Cookie’s First Holiday Abroad

This post contains affiliate links. If you book or buy through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Valkenburg Was Never Meant to Be on the Itinerary

Valkenburg was not on our road trip. It was not even a maybe. We had our hearts set on Brussels, and then spent an increasingly grim few evenings discovering that pet-friendly accommodation with overnight parking in Brussels is, apparently, a myth. A few days before we were due to leave, we gave up and started again.

A little research later, we swapped Brussels for Maastricht. Which was lovely, right up until we tried to book somewhere to sleep. At that notice, with a dog, in Maastricht, there was nothing left. The closest thing we could find was a twenty minute drive away in a place called Valkenburg.

I want to be clear that I did not just grab the first available room. I never do. Every stay on this trip was booked before we left the house, and even in a scramble a few days out I still went through my usual checklist: genuinely pet-friendly rather than grudgingly pet-tolerant, spotless reviews, secure parking. We ended up at Hotel Riche, a three star right in the middle of the village, with breakfast included. There was thought behind it. What there was not, was any thought about the town itself. Valkenburg was a postcode to me. Somewhere to put our heads before the next long drive, and that was the whole plan.

Because of that, we did not rush. We took our time in Maastricht, wandered until we were done wandering, and rolled into Valkenburg at around six in the evening with no expectations whatsoever.

And Then We Got Out of the Car

How wrong we were.

Valkenburg is a little gem. Small, quaint, and genuinely whimsical, which is a word I do not use lightly and would normally roll my eyes at. Marl-stone houses the colour of shortbread, a narrow river running right through the middle of town with tiny private bridges leading to people’s back doors, flowers spilling over every railing, and a castle ruin on the hill above it all.

We were starving. Properly starving, the kind where you start making bad decisions. And instead of finding somewhere to eat like sensible adults, we looked at each other and went for a walk. It is not a big place, so we managed to see most of it in about two hours, with Cookie doing his usual routine of stopping to inspect every single planter.

The whole time we were walking I was doing sums in my head about whether we could push the next morning’s departure back. We could not. We had a full day planned and no slack in it at all. So I did the next best thing and quietly started planning a return trip instead.

Dinner at an Unreasonable Hour, Then the Castle in the Dark

We ate very, very late. A burger and proper thick-cut Dutch fries on a terrace, by which point I would have eaten almost anything, but it was genuinely good and the beer was cold.

After that we went out again to walk up to the castle area, which was a slightly ambitious move on a full stomach given Valkenburg’s castle sits on an actual hill. Everything was shut, of course. The ruins, the caves underneath them, all closed for the evening. We read the information board by torchlight like the extremely cool people we are, walked the path around the walls, and looked out over the valley in the last of the light.

It should have been a disappointment. It wasn’t. There is a specific kind of quiet a village gives you that a city never can, and walking those empty paths with the dog and no cars and no noise was, weirdly, one of my favourite hours of the whole trip.

Swipe for more →

Would I Recommend Valkenburg? Absolutely.

Not as a stopover, though, which is the mistake I made. Valkenburg deserves to be the destination, not the place you sleep on the way to somewhere else. It is small enough to see properly in a day and interesting enough that you will want two, and the pace of it is the entire point. No traffic, no crowds pushing past you, no sense that you are behind schedule.

We also only found out that evening that there is a thermal spa just up the road, at a genuinely reasonable price, which felt like a personal insult given we were leaving at dawn. It is on the list. The whole place is on the list, really, filed under “come back and do this properly.”

What We’d Book With More Time

If you are going with more sense than we had, start here.

Where to Stay in Valkenburg

Valkenburg is small, so almost everywhere puts you close to the village. The difference is really how much of an occasion you want to make of it, and whether they will take the dog.

Next stop: Drielandenpunt, Vaals. Wish us luck!

---