B is for beach

April 17, 2014

Today was another nice sunny day. We both had a good sleep, which to be honest I didn’t think would happen. Our hotel is older and a little on the sketchy side. There was someone down the hall that had a small dog in their room that was barking a lot yesterday evening and Ostend seems to be the place to go for Brits who want to party and get drunk, so I wasn’t too sure what the clientele was like. However it was a surprisingly quiet night and when we went down for breakfast there were mostly families with kids, so that was reassuring.

After breakfast we headed into Bruges, which was about 20-30 minutes away. We managed to find a parking spot close to the centre square and pretty much just wandered aimlessly through town for about 2 hours. It was very charming, lots of cobbled streets, old buildings, churches, etc.

 There were also canals with little boat tours and horse-drawn carriages (these horsed looked like they had it pretty easy, clip-clopping along the flat roads, not like the exhausted horses we saw trying to catch a nap at the bottom of Neuschwanstein before having to drag a bunch of tourists back up the hill). We went into a couple of the churches and they both were having very extensive restoration work done on the inside.

After our 2 hours was up (which is all we paid for parking), we decided to check out another nearby city called Gent. I had googled things to see in Belgium a few days ago and Gent had come up and thought it looked like a cool place to wander around, but of course I couldn’t actually remember what it was that I thought I wanted to see (I have been googling several places daily, I can’t remember everything!!). So we just set the nav system to take us to the city centre and off we went.

The nice thing about going to the “city centre” is that this is where all the big churches and squares are, which is perfect for wandering around and being touristy. The awful thing about going to the “city centre” is that just when you thing you have driving in Europe figured out, the nav lady leads you blindly onto what seems like pedestrian only lanes and you are thinking, “oh crap, I don’t think we are supposed to be driving here, I don’t see any other cars driving here, everyone is looking at us, is this lane only for the trollies? Oh thank-goodness, there’s another car, follow them out! Follow them out!!”. Of course because the centre is the oldest part of the city the lanes are really narrow so most of them are one way, they aren’t laid out in a grid but more of a circle around the square. Basically it’s a crazy maze.

So after escaping the maze of central Gent, we circled back around to the outskirts of the centre and actually found a parking spot on the street. We headed back into the centre and wandered aimlessly again, just taking in the sights. The one big church we went into was also under construction. We also found a castle in the middle of the city, which was surprising at first because usually a large keep like this would be on the top of a hill so as to be easily defendable, however I guess that wouldn’t apply in Belgium since, as far as we have seen, it’s pretty flat. We thought about going in, but we didn’t really have enough time to make it worthwhile and we wanted to make sure our parking didn’t run out of time (the last thing we need at this point is for our car to be towed, ticketed, or end up with a boot). Instead, we got our first French fry cone with mayo and sat in the square and enjoyed the warm sun on our backs. Then we headed back to the car (right where we left it), and headed back to Ostend.

Luck was definitely on our side today because we found street parking a block and a half from our hotel! It was a total high-five moment because we drove around FOREVER yesterday looking for a spot, even quite a ways from our hotel, with no luck and today we found one on our first pass.

We specifically chose to stay in Ostend because it was right on the beach, so we headed up to our room and switched to sandals and went for a nice long walk on the beach. The beach itself was packed with families playing in the sand (no swimmers tho, it was pretty late in the afternoon already and when we went to check the water it was freezing!). Along the promenade there were lots of people as well, riding bikes, walking dogs, etc.

We decided to cheap out for dinner and went to Pizza Hut next to our hotel (we have eaten a lot of pizza on this trip…). We have been pretty good about avoiding fast food chains on this trip (as opposed to our Japan trip), but we did have McDonald’s yesterday just because it was quick and easy. Except that it was quick at all. It took forever, I don’t think I have ever waited that long at any fast food place ever, and it wasn’t even a long line. I don’t know what was going on but I wasn’t impressed. Also the fries were overcooked and they didn’t salt them at all. Anyways, after our pizza tonight we picked up a chocolate covered Belgian waffle for dessert, it was delicious.