Mayfair Hotel Ostende

... city. Awesome architecture and canals winding around the city, as I took tons of pictures as always and just enjoyed the city.

Apparently Brugges had a movie made recently with it as a location; I'll have to check it out sometime. The main "art" piece I saw was a Madonna with Child from -the- Michaelangelo from Italy. It was quit nice, as were the countless other paintings and sculptures I saw in that ...

... huge damage during the war and required significant reconstruction. Some parts of the original buildings still stand, and show shrapnel damage, and some of the statues in the church walls are badly damaged.

Next stop after Ypres was at the Hooge Crater Cemetary. This cemetary contains the graves of nearly 6000 soldiers, many of whom were younger than I am, and a lot were only engraved with 'A British/Australian/New ...

... attention to detail.

Back on the road, we headed further north and crossed over the border in Luxembourg. We stopped briefly at some motorway services, but as we were running short for time we didn't get the chance to stop in Luxembourg city. Going through one village we did see a pretty cool house on top of an outcrop of rocks, which looked great all lit up, but it was hard to get a shot which did it justice.

After crossing over into Belgium we stopped for gas, then ...

... the best way to learn about the beer produced in all of the neighboring provinces. The staff was so helpful when looking through the twenty page menu, they have seriously tried all 200 beers. The Belgian beer is also very strong, so after a couple of drink we decided it was time to try some of the local food.
There are two french fry carts sitting in the town square, the competition is steep between ...

... went for a wander around the Beguinage and the little streets of the city before stopping for lunch in a restaurant on the main square, which was really nice and served local traditional food which was really great.

We wanted to go up the clock-tower but the queue was far too long and we decided that we could go back another day during the week when there weren't so many tourists!

The Christmas market had just started in Bruges so we spent quite a while wandering ...

... anyone going to Belgium, the food is insanely expensive! Even fast food can run you 10 Euros and a decent meal will cost you 30 Euros easy. It was so difficult finding any inexpensive restaurants we almost went crazy.

Well that’s Ypres. Quite the learning experience for us both but we weren’t done yet. We decided to make our way along the French Flanders/Normandy coast before making our way back to my Aunt and Uncles for a rest.

... has been preserved. After our nice walk through there we walked to the more modern area of the town and discovered a separate square with the most unusual statues in a fountain. It seemed to greatly contrast the medieval feel of the city and was almost shocking. We enjoyed them greatly though and took some pictures with the ducky of course!

After spending some time sitting at the steps in the market square we made our way up ...

... to expulse alcohol from your blood without too much danger for the general population. Killian is fond of them for sure as is any kids. He made 2 new girlfriends, definitely older than him (9) but he was not paying attention to those details and had good fun with Manon and Soda. They even invented a game with stones that he promised to teach to his ...

Zeeland was interesting, not a bad place for my home country to be named after and the little town of Veere was certainly a favourite of mine. However, with time ticking by I had to get on the move again, this time I took the bike on the train through to Gouda. Naturally I had an interest in the small town of Gouda, having worked for some time in the Cheese industry. The town itself was very cute, with a large market ...

... had a Hansgrohe faucet and vessel sink, the beds were bunked and made of plain old 2x4s I think. They looked rather like the lofts that some people had at BC my freshman year in college. So, I figured it was E4 for the room, and $40 for the bathroom. I only stayed at this place for one night, because the same room on a Saturday was going to run me $70! Bruges may be the best smelling town in the world. It smells like a bakery and like chocolate and ...