My husband and I are WWII nuts and wanted to see the woods of Bastogne and Foy. (And the Bastogne War Museum? Gold star! A must see.) Seeing as there are no Rick Steves recommended places to stay in the area, we relied on Trip Advisor and took our chances on Le Merceny, a surprisingly modern, posh hotel located atop a petrol station and supermarket.
It was great! Can I tell you how truly wonderful it was to have a little taste of home? Cool beverages, a fridge in the room to keep food and drinks ( I never realized how stressful it would be to know that I either had to waste food or stuff myself b/c we could never take leftovers back to the places we stayed in Europe), air-conditioning (the irony being it was only 50 degrees out and we both had pull out our cool weather gear that we thankfully had brought for Chamonix and didn’t use anywhere else; but hey, it was comforting just that it was there)!
The poor woman who checked us in spoke no English; we spoke no French. But, we got by with sign language and it was all good! Surprisingly nice to have the supermarket below as well. This was a little beyond the halfway part of a first time, two week trip in Europe for us. We were coming off of a horrible hotel experience in Chamonix. I was weary of not being able to read menus and being unable to communicate with non-English speakers (German is my only other sort-of language), so we picked out wonderful salads, fruits, and beverages from the supermarket and carried them up to our room, where we had wifi (another luxury after crawling out of the Alps).
It was just the rejuvenation we two spoiled Americans needed before traveling back into the lands of open-windowed, fan-less rooms with warm water from the bathroom tap for our water bottles and spotty-to-zero communication with the outside world. Hooray for Belgium!