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Published: February 8th 2006
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After more than a year in the UK (and not having driven for that whole time!) Charmaine and I decided we should hire a car and explore the continent. Belgium is only a small country and fairly close to the ferry from England, so that’s where we headed. As I was leaving Chapman Taylor to start work with Floyd Slaski, I made Wednesday my last day at work and we took a long weekend.
17 November 2005 - London to Brussels We picked up a car from Hertz in Fulham first thing Thursday morning and after clearing London traffic, we REALLY had to pull finger to get down to Dover in order to make our 11am ferry to Calais. The little black Ford Focus performed well though and we scraped in with a few minutes to spare. After a year out from being behind the wheel, it all came back to me pretty swiftly. Driving on the wrong side of the road in France however took a while to get used to!
We headed up through France on our way to Brussels and decided to stop in at Lille to let Charmaine have a look around. (I’d already
been once before). We made it into Brussels after dark, checked into the hotel, then headed into the centre of town for dinner. The old town-square was lovely and we enjoyed our first great meal of mussels, french fries (actually a Belgian dish) and Belgium beer in a small restaurant overlooking the square. :-)
18 November 2005 - Brussels to Antwerp The next day we got into a restaurant for a late breakfast (including some more Belgium beers) and then hit the city on foot for some site seeing. Nice town square with great old buildings, LOADS of chocolate stores & cheese stores, the famous Manniken Pis statue, and the royal palace.
As we were walking through the old town during the day, we discovered a street that was lined with fresh seafood restaurants. However time became an issue and much to Charmaines distress, we never made it back to try them out. The thing with travelling this late in the year though, is that daylight becomes an issue and unfortunately by the time we got to the Atomiom (built for the World Expo in the Northern part of the city) it was too dark to take photos.
Plus it was closed for renovations.
We made it into Antwerp with high hopes of finding a seafood restaurant for dinner, but first found that the hostel we wanted to stay at was no longer there! (Always book ahead) So after looking around the city for ages trying to sort out new digs and then a car park, we finally got a really nice apartment in the middle of the old town above a cafe.
Heading out into town at 10pm for dinner though, choices were limited to say the least. No seafood to be found, but we ended up settling on a Turkish restaurant and had a really nice meal. We walked the town square (very cold) and found a little bar to crawl into and sample a couple more beers before heading home.
19 November 2005 - Antwerp to Bruges Up early for breakfast at the café, we wandered out into a beautifully crisp, clear day.
We wandered the riverside for a bit, saw the castle, the town square, sampled some more beer, bought a selection of beers to take home and even found some lobster for lunch! A pretty quiet town though, so we shot
out of there to check out Bruges.
Bruges is surrounded by and intertwined with canals, which of course leads to a mass of one way roads. After getting lost a couple of times we managed to find our way to the underground carpark and into our hostel.
Again wandering the town square after dark, it quickly became apparent that Bruges was by far the most tourist orientated city we’d been to. All the restaurants had English translations in the windows and English seemed to be the most prevalent language we could hear (English accent and all).
Belgium has three main languages, French, Dutch and Flemish (a mixture of the two). Brussels was mainly French with Antwerp and Bruges mainly Dutch.
We still couldn’t find a big enough seafood spread for CK, but another big bowl of mussels and some more great frites hit the spot nicely for me! We had been tipped off to a bar that had over 300 different types of Belgian beer, so off we headed to really get stuck in. So many flavours and so many strengths of beer, we had a great time!
20 November 2006 - Bruges to London With a surprisingly
Mmmm beer!
Theres going to be a theme here... light hangover, we managed to get out and about at a reasonable hour for a look around. We wanted to take a horse and cart ride, but the line was ridiculously long (bloody tourists!) and at 30 euro for the ride we decided against it. Instead we took a boat ride around the canals which was great!
After the early morning fog cleared away, we were treated to another gorgeous clear, yet cold day. A bit of chocolate and cheese shopping later and it was time for a beer... um, I mean lunch. :-)
We wandered the town for the rest of the afternoon, checked out Lovers Lake, then headed out of town. The drive back to Calais was fairly straight forward, with a lovely sunset over the plains just outside of Bruges. Unfortunately we missed our ferry back to Dover, (by 10min) and didn’t get back to London until 11pm. Ah well!
Bruges was by far the prettiest city, Brussels worth a revisit, but didn’t think a great deal of Antwerp (although aparently it has the biggest night club in Europe, which we missed!).
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