The Belgian Riviera

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Hi all,

11th Aug - On our second day in Brugge we again went into town and this time the weather was great, we had a good day wandering around the sites and shops.

12th Aug - Our next stop was the Belgian coastal resort of Nieuwpoort, instead of driving straight there we took the coast road and drove west from Blankenberge, it's not somewhere you would not think of for a holiday but we passed through half a dozen resorts including Ostend, Middelkerke but the best looked like De Haan with it's alpine looking chalets and nice cafes and bars, well worth a long wknd trip if your on the ferry to Zeebrugge I'd say.
The site at Nieuwpoort was great for the kids, pool, mini golf, playgrounds so they made the most of it between the massive thunder and lightning storms, talking of mini golf we decided to have a European mini golf challenge (or midget golf as they call it in Belgium, no kidding) the first game was won by Daniel and so he keeps letting me know! If you ever pass by Nieuwpoort it has a very smart town centre and about 1km away is the beach resort of Nieuwpoort Bad which has a nice beach and on the night we visited a miss Belgian coast beauty pageant.........very nice.

My observations on The Netherlands and Belgium:
Apart from the blindingly obvious similarities that they both like, cheese, windmills, canals and loads of cyclists, they also share the fact that most blokes still have big taches and wear speedo trunks! and what's more these blokes have gorgeous wife's/girlfriends, where's my trunks from the Benidorm stag night!!!

By the way when I write this stuff it's just spare of the moment, no pre-writes and as we never got taught how to write a blog at David Lister (in fact they didn't teach us much in English at Lister even when the teacher had the class under control) so stick with it as it's quite hard remembering where we have actually been over the past week or so.

Saturday 14th August

We left Belgium and headed into France but first we'd planned to visit the Tyne Cott WWI war cemetery, I've written a separate blog on this so read that for details.

Bye for now

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Photos

Harry on the pier
Nieuwpoort Bad view from the pier