56. Bruges & Ypres

Easter Sunday! Today we headed off to Bruges, a short 2 hour drive from our campsite. It was nice going into Belgium but we were happy that we had spent the last week in Holland as seems so much more green space, Belgium is quite built up.

We arrived at Bruges and struggled to find anywhere free to park, we settled to pay £25 for the day but enroute to that park up we found a little space so I swooped in. We had a 25 minute walk into the centre, we took Maddy along too. It was super pretty Bruges and had very impressive buildings which some backed onto canals which was cool. The weather wasn't on our side unfortunately so it was quite wet, we had a walk around the sites for a couple of hours. We can imagine this is a great place for a weekend getaway and we are both happy we visited.

After Bruges we headed onto Ypres where the trip began... We wanted to go to the Easter Menin Gate Ceremony. The Menin Gate is a British memorial which is dedicated to all the missing in action soldiers from WW1. The ceremony was very moving and really happy Grace got to see this as I loved visiting with school many years ago. After the ceremony we headed into Ypres to have a look around and were blown away with how pretty it was, alot more so than rainy Bruges but we wondered if weather played a part in this.

Ypres was absolutely destroyed in WW1 with over 1 million soldiers killed or missing in action from over 50 different nations. It was also the first place the Germans used Gas as a weapon. Lots of history here so we have decided to come back in tomorrow and look further, there is also a couple more stops we want to make before heading to our last stop before getting the ferry back on Tuesday.Read more