Bruges - day 33

What a lovely day it was to wake up to. Rather cool with a slight frost, but beautiful clear skies. We got up earlish, did our dishes and had wonderful hot showers. The last 2 nights have been a bit grim as the showers have been luke warm which has been surprising as most are pretty good. But this morning it was bliss! We were on the road by 9, but got distracted on the way out by a supermarket. Got a lovely watermelon and more berries. Oh, and the bread here is amazing, so I got a bread roll and Jody had a pastry. We thought the road around Brussels might be a nightmare as we hadn’t heard good things, but it wasn’t too bad. So after about 2 hours we found ourselves in Ghent. This was a place that I had wanted to visit, but there were no campsites in town, so we would have had to park up out of town. So we decided just to drive through the middle. So that went pretty well, by golly there are a lot of wonderful buildings which Jody tried to take pics of while we were driving. There were a lot of tram lines, and it is always confusing as to what the road rules are around trams. We followed one for a while – another car was in front of us so we thought it was fine. Hmmm nek minit we are driving on the grass between the tram tracks, oops this one might only be for trams. That was confirmed by the tram driving towards us with the driver shaking his finger at us. So our options then were limited to reversing a long way, going the wrong way up a busy one way street, trying to get over a couple of kerbs to a road, or going straight ahead on the tram track and hoping we would fit through the 2 bollards at the end. Option 4 was for us, and thankfully we made it through. I really need to be a bit more onto it with my videoing. Yes this is a bit stressful for me as the driver, but I think it stresses Jody out more and her reactions to these situations are just so funny that it just makes me laugh and take it in my stride. We haven’t had a funny Nico story for a few days, I have been missing them!

So then it was onto Bruge (Brougha). We got there around 2pm on a stunning day though it was still only around 16 degrees. Our washing had been in the garage for 3 days, so it was nice to finally get that dried as well as doing a couple more loads. We won’t be doing anymore for a while so great to have a fine day. We then mucked around for a while just relaxing, and I started organising my packing. Around 7pm we finally got sorted to bike into the City. This is about 3kms away, and was really pretty. There are lots of waterways, and a big river with locks for the boats to go through, and bridges that go up to let boats through as well as turning in a circle to open up with the boats. Quite fascinating to watch. There were many big squares with churches. We ate dinner in one of those – Flemish stew which was wonderful and tender, and came with hot chips – weird! Then we biked back to Nico – it is getting dark just after 9pm which is great. Then another game of 500 – we must replace the cards as they got pretty sticky with limoncello! Tomorrow we will spend the day just cruising around Bruges for our last day on this side of the channel.Read more