De Pauw

This morning we were awake at our normal time of 7:30am. I made tea and coffee and we both drank them in bed while I plotted a route to Ghent trying to avoid the low emissions zones. It was a total nightmare trying to look for a route on my phone, compare where the low emissions was and then try to plot it in to the sat nav. The problem being that TomTom doesn’t currently recognise low emissions zones. I eventually worked it out by plotting a course that involved 2 fake stops on the motorway so TomTom would guide us around the ring road rather than through the city center.
We arrived in Ghent just after 11am, I’d already found a huge car park on the edge of the city before leaving England and getting there was easy enough. Once parked Ellie fed me up with Wanda toasties before we left. Probably so I wasn’t begging for food like a dog every time we passed a restaurant.
Our original plan was to cycle in on the cycle paths but in the end we decided to walk in and it was about a mile and a half in an arrow straight line right to the city center and our first stop of the day. Gravensteen Castle.
The castle itself is right in the historic part of the city centre, right on the canal with a moat around the outside. Even the local buildings matched the era of the castle and it almost felt like we were back in Disney, walking down diagon alley and visiting hogwarts. There was even a little bar called the troll bar that had hundreds of different trolls in the bay windows, it was an amazing city.
The Current Castle was built in 1180 and was the residence of the counts of flanders until 1353. It was then re- purposed as a court, prison, mint and even a cotton factory. It was restored to its current condition over 1893 -1903 and is now a museum.
I was only here for outside pictures which I managed to get, mostly with no people in them. Then we continued on our tour of Ghent and to our next stop here.Read more