Don't be cowed by life!

Instead, touch a cow's snout - on a Luxembourg hike

Author: By Tom Bross, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, April 12, 1998

Page: M10

Section: Travel

For a one-week retreat from urban intensity, I chose Luxembourg -- where the capital city is really just a low-key, large-size town and the first tangible ``feel'' of arriving in open countryside comes quickly, a scant 10-15 minutes after leaving the airport or central railway station. Smaller than Rhode Island, barely twice the spread-out expanse of Greater Los Angeles, this last of the world's surviving grand duchies covers only 999 square miles.

So try figuring out how 5,000 kilometers -- 3,107 miles -- of marked walking/hiking pathways could be squeezed inside such a tiny patch of European terrain. Uncoiled and joined together to form a straight-ahead line, they'd easily match the transcontinental distances between San Francisco and Boston, Lisbon and Istanbul.

Instead, the network (totaling many more kilometers than all of Luxembourg's roads and highways) bends and twists throughout valleys and highlands, passing pastures and plowed fields, crossing rivers, and frequently slithering into and out of thick, silent forests.

After opting for a hiking holiday, I further decided to do my daily trekking in the Ardennes, the duchy's northernmost, hilliest, and woodsiest region. Wedged between Belgium and Germany, the Ardennes is vaguely triangular in shape, with an impressive number of medieval castles commanding high-altitude vantage points.

There have always been extra-vigorous types who equip themselves for serious Ardennes touring by strapping on monster backpacks. Lugging bedrolls and sleeping bags, sometimes even foldup mini-tents, they're all set to camp out, roughing it in closest possible proximity to nature.

Good for them, but not for me. Rather than heating canned stew over a Sterno flame before overnighting beneath the stars, I'd prefer a dining room, bedroom, and indoor plumbing. At the risk of being branded a citified softie, an energizing regimen of morning and afternoon hiking appeals to me -- so long as I'm headed toward a modest bit of comfort at day's end.

Fresh-air exercise and indoor relaxation can be combined quite nicely in several offbeat parts of Europe, Luxembourg's Ardennes included, thanks to a convenience called ``hiking without luggage.'' First comes dinner, then bundled-up sleep in a country inn. Breakfast fuels you for a lengthy hike, perhaps with midday provisions already stashed in your lightweight rucksack. The innkeepers, meanwhile, arrange transport of your main baggage -- the darned heavy stuff -- to whichever lodging where you'll be spending the next night. And so on down the line. Simple and sensible. All because families owning small resort hotels situated in 10 of the region's prettiest villages decided about 15 years ago to team up by making ``hiking without luggage'' service available to their guests.

It's a package plan currently priced at 2,000 Luxembourg (or Belgian) francs per person per day, amounting to approximately $56. That pays for a full-course dinner and a substantial (translation: considerably more than bare-bones continental) buffet breakfast -- plus, of course, a cozy bed in a cozy room with a private bath. Figure on being charged an extra 300 francs, roughly $8-$9, if you'd like to have lunch-to-go packed for the rucksack.

For those on the hiking plan, each dinner at each lodging is a Euro-style table d'hote affair, entailing a set menu rather than privileged a-la-carte choosiness. So what's to save you from the possibility of eating chicken or veal or fish night after night? Easy answer. By phone or fax, the clever innkeepers circulate the menus of the dinners they've decided to cook for you, therefore avoiding repetition.

Village-to-village distances aren't too intimidating here in the compact Ardennes. The mapped-out hiking itineraries, purposely meandering for proper dosages of exertion, amount to 15-20 kilometers or about 9-12 miles. Sticking to a steady pace and allowing myself a half-hour picnic break, I averaged six hours of foot-power travel daily, resulting in ample time to wind down and clean up before nightfall and dinner.

Numbered, arrow-shaped signposts point to this or that direction along every pathway in the network. Moreover, they're lettered and numbered. Following the B route from Hotel Hatz in Kautenbach to Hotel Theis in Bourscheid-Plage, for example, I came upon the inevitable fork in the trail -- numbered 3 to the right, 5 to the left. Time to study the map, guiding me the correct way via a hamlet with a five-syllable name -- Schlinder-manderscheid -- to Bourscheid-Plage.

I accustomed myself to stretches of steep Ardennes hill-climbing. That comes with the territory, where reaching the top brings the reward of panoramic views. On a certain blue-sky, puffy-cloud afternoon, while sitting on a rock to rest legs and feet, I looked out over undulating pine forests, four rural villages with church-steeple weather vanes glinting in the sun and -- not much farther beyond -- Belgian and German meadows and timberland.

Hotel Theis nestles inside a glen, a waterfall tumbles right beside the inn's slate-stone terrace, and Bourscheid Castle looms above, at the edge of a 420-meter (1,378-foot) ridge. Wildflowers were in springtime bloom when I climbed the path spiraling up to the drawbridge. This 13th-century bastion, one of Luxembourg's biggest, is a partially ruined maze of chambers, passages, ramparts, and towers. By peering like a defending knight through bowmen's slits in corner turrets, I had terrific views of the curving Upper Sure River below. For extra dramatic effect, floodlights illuminate the castle after dark.

Farther west, the river makes a remarkably tight loop around Esch-sur-Sure, arguably the duchy's most photogenically situated community, population 350 or so. Starting from Welscheid's Hotel Reuter one drizzly morning, I walked there by way of Heiderscheid, where a monument to ``the gallant soldiers'' of the US 80th Infantry Division reminds passersby that World War II's Battle of the Bulge crashed through the Ardennes 53 winters ago.

Esch-sur-S-ue's popularity as a vacationers' hangout dates back hundreds of years. Along with its own castle ruins, the crammed-together village exudes a casual atmosphere and has a fair number of hospitable cafes and tourist inns. (Arriving from Welscheid, I stayed at Hotel de la Sure, sufficiently modernized to suit 1990s sensibilities, yet still loaded with Luxembourgish antiques).

And there's more to the setting than the river loop, because ``Esch'' is also surrounded by lofty wooded cliffs. After taking their pick, hikers clamber upward, then set foot on a marvelous tangle of forest and pastoral trails. In all, 30 kilometers or nearly 20 zigzagging miles of hill-and-dale paths, the best of which -- by my reckoning, anyway -- start along an escarpment overlooking the village, then traverse broad, rolling fields of clover.

Which is where I met a herd of grazing cows, including the one whose snout I touched. Adventurous me, a city guy with a rucksack on my back, out for a country stroll in the green heart of Europe.

Getting to the Ardennes Region: Choose between a rental-car drive or taking the train from Luxembourg City's central station.

Information: Write to the Luxembourg National Tourist Office, 17 Beekman Place, New York, NY 10022; or phone (212) 935-8888.