The Poppies B&B Ypres

Hé hé !

L'Amérique latine, nous voici nous voilà très très bientôt !!!
Plus que quelques heures avant le décollage...
L'excitation et l'appréhension sont 2 émotions qui se battent en duel en ce moment.

Le départ est prévu à 20h ce lundi 7 décembre de Paris CDG et l'atterrisage le mardi 8 décembre à Buenos Aires.
Nous en avons rêvé et ce projet va enfin devenir réalité.

Nous partons tout équipés : les 2 v ...

... drizzling quite a bit here in Gent, but that's ok...

Tomorrow I'll try and brave the weather (here's hoping for some more sunshine) around Gent. My last full day in Belgium, since on Monday I take a train out to Dusseldorf, to spend my last night in Germany and Europe with my first hosts. Then, I leave around noon from the Dusseldorf airport to Fort Myers, back in the states. Last 3 days....

After a bit of a hard night, we were all up at about 9am to check out of our hotel and go for a quick wander around Brugge, another UNESCO World Heritage Site. Often described as the 'Venice of the North', there are quite a few canals in Brugge, but as we discovered, there's even more chocolate shops - they're everywhere!
We walked down a stretch of road, only about 1km long, and saw about 7-8 chocolate shops, including ...

... fuel in Dijon, which (at least the parts we saw) didn't look all that great, in contrast to the rest of the country which I thought was great.

Our final stop in France was in Metz, where we grabbed lunch, had a quick walk around the markets and I bought a crepe with strawberry jam (delicious). We had a walk through St Stephens Cathedral - a massive church whose construction started in around 1220 and finished in 1520. It is a very spectacular building, incredibly tall and with ...

... the market and the shops and then went on a boat ride which was fantastic, after which we went to a tea-room which claimed to have the best hot chocolate in town, and it was really good! It was incredibly sickly though and gave both Erin and I a headache for the ride home!

Altogether a really fun day out in Bruges, truffles bought, Belgian food eaten and Belgian alcohol drunk, and Belgian chocolate drunk! This is another place where we will definitely be returning!!

... written poem. They had it translated in various languages. We found out the story behind the poem while there as well, since like myself, i only knew bits and pieces of it. The story goes that in the second week of fighting during the Second
Battle of Ypres a Canadian artillery officer, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed
on 2 May, 1915 by a German artillery shell. He was a ...

... his Dad in his wheel chair. I was supposed  to be part of the colour party, but I really didn't want that role; there is no way I could look as sharp as those British Troopers the night before so I handed off my colour party duties to an ex military member of our group. I was thrilled to be able to line up with Dick (Jamie's Dad) and Brenda. With Brenda and I on either side of him, Dick would not need a wheel chair. Dick is one of the finest, most ...

... chocolates who had an amazing selling technique. Conned many people into buying the traveler pack - but hey I've got heaps of fudge/truffles/chocolate to last me a long time. The journey home was long!!! Drove back to Calais, caught the ferry - where had a couple of cheeky Bullmers (cider) got back on the bus to be dropped off at Canary Wharf. I thought the tube would ...

... very different, as Poperinghe (or Pops as it was known) was a rest stop for Allied troops on their time off, and Langemarke was behind German lines. Today was a tough day of sightseeing both because of the rain and also the intensity of the subject matter. We relaxed in our B&B with a few Belgian beers and mulled over our day so far. It wasn't over yet as we headed back out just before 8pm for the main reason we had decided to stay in Ypres in the first ...

... In the morning we are privy to a display of 'finch singing'. We were unaware, so were the tourist office, so were the hotel staff, that there was a competition taking place on the Friday morning at 9.00am. Outcome of this lack of knowledge - all the cars, including ours, parked in the square were towed away to goodness knows where. It was all quite dodgy and only by payment in cash were we able to get the car back. However, the finch comp was - interesting - everyone taking part had ...