Well, yesterday's adventure has brought us to a coastal town in northern Belgium called Oostduinkerke. It has a beach, which is handy, since the weather has actually been sunny for two days. A modern day record for Belgium?
Ok, maybe I should start at the beginning of this tale. In fact, it's probably the first genuine travel adventure we've had so far. I loved it, and thought it was a thrill. Neil was less comfortable. So we may avoid these kinds of adventures in the future, for better or worse. But how many people have slept in a shed?
Ok, wait. Now I'm giving it away. Let me do this cronologically:
We woke up in Brugges at about 8am, and went and bought some bread to make some sandwiches, diched our bags in the train station lockers, rented some bikes, and pedalled into town in search of two beds. The short answer here would be that there was not a single bed available at the hostles in Brugge. So yeah, we weren't worried. There are dozens of towns nearby with hostels, or cheap hotels. We'll be fine.... ish.
Well, it seems as though this national holiday runs a bit deeper than we thought. Everyone in Belgium has gone somewhere else in Beligum, and there's nothing available according to our hapless internet search. We even checked the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and nearby parts of Germany and France, and I guess the celebration was too much for one coutnry and has spilled over the borders, because we couldn't seem to find anything.
[I have to take a second to tell you that I started this blog entry in Belgium, where the keyboard was normal, and I'm continuing it in France, where all of the keys are in different spots..... so please excuse the spelling errors, and the amount of time it takes me to update the blog.]
The internet we were using was in one of the hostels in Brugges that we failed to find space in, so we asked him if he knew of any places we should try. He offered to call some places in Brugges for us. Um, yes please!
Well, let's just say I got very familiar with the sound of rejection in Flennish.
Ok, plan C. We asked if there were any other hostels in nearby towns that he knew of. "Would you like me to call some?" Um, yes please!
So he called a place we could bike to in about half an hour. This excites me. I was hoping for that kind of a random adventure.
Full.
Ok, some of the beach towns?
Full.
Ummmm..... He knows one other place that is "kind of tough to get to" but he is almost certain there will be room. Yeah, sure, where ever we need to go is fine, as long as there are two beds.
Hey, guess what? There was room! Fantastic!
Oh, where is it? The town is called Oostduinkerke (pronounced Oh-sten-kirk with equal emphasis on each syllable). Try google maps. You'll have to zoom out some distance to see exactly where on earth it is.
So ok, we hqve some beds. How do we get there? Train to Oostende, then a tram to Ooostduinkerke? That's easy. I guess "hard to get to" has a different meaning over here, because I took hard "to get to" to involve bushwhacking after driving for 600km.... Cultural differences?
We biked around Brugges for the rest of the afternoon and ate lunch in a beautiful park along a canal. Brugges is a cool town, but a bike makes short work of it. There's defintiely lot's we didn't do, like museums, chocolate, tour an old brewery, and drink even more beer, but we still feel we were able to see the whole town in about a day.
Ok, so we'd better head to this Oostduinkerke place. So we returned our bikes and got our bags from the lockers and boarded the next train to Oostend. We walked around Oostend for a bit, looking for the tram, until we found out that it was right over by the train station that we got off at....
.... so we stopped in at the local hostel on our way back and booked Sunday night in Oostend. This was the safest bet to make sure we could get back to Paris in time to meet Amy. Good, so we only need to fill in Saturday night and then we're golden. And since we got one night in Oostduinkerke, why not make it two?
We rode the tram all the way to Oostduinkerke. A woman at the tram stop in Oostend saw that we were backpackers from Canada and immediately began to give us advice on where to get off, and things to do. Mostly she said the beach was nice. That sounded very good. It was nice to talk to one of the locals for a while, instead of just crappy old Neil....
Yeah, by the way, I lost the address for our hostel in Oostduinkere along the way, but figured it wouldn't matter because it was the only hostel in town qnd the tourist office was bound to be aware of it. I was right, but it did get weird when we walked into the middle of a residential neighbourhood to find it.... and then couldn't tell if it was a hostel.... and then couldn't figure out how to get in.... but we figured it out.
We asked if we could add another night to our stay.
They said they were full.
Shoot.
What do we do now? Check the internet again? Find a night train and sleep on it? Sleep in the train station? How cold is it outside?
After having a lengthy, but mostly shocked/silent conversation about these ideas, the hostel clerk said, "We may have one other option for you, if you are desperate, but it may not be suitable."
I'm listening.
"We have, out back, a.... um, I don't know the word in English but it's like a chalet...."
"A shack?"
"Yes yes! A shack! But it has beds in it and we can use it in emergencies, but you'll have to come back inside for the bathroom and a shower."
"Ummm, that's fine! How much can we pay you for it?"
"10 euro per person."
10 euro???? Is he serious? That's about half the cost of the next cheapest place we've stayed. This just keeps getting better and better. And this ain't no ordinary shack. It really is more of a chalet. Oh, and it's a private chalet!
So we exitedly told our Brazilian roommates about our tale, and they laughed with us. Good times.
Our two days in Oostduinkerke were great. We spent half a day just lying on the beach, turning from pasty white to a light golden brown. Yep, life's a pretty sweet fruit.
I loved the whole experience, and really enjoyed ending up somewhere random.... Especially since somewhere random was a sunny beach with great sand, with temperatures approaching the lid-twenties. I'd do the whole trip like that, except there will be three of us, so we're going to start booking ahead... Especially around weekends...
I'd do ity again though....
Belgium's Flag
Map of Belgium