France and Belgium

We got up early in Dover and caught the taxi down to the ferry terminal seeing as we hadn’t booked, no problem getting on the 10am sailing though.  Reece had organised a rental car for us to collect on the other side, but when we got there the office was closed for a 2-hour lunch so we had to wait for 1 1/2 hrs anyway, and then they gave us a way bigger car than he’d asked for, but we couldn’t even use the extra size because there was two extra seats in the boot.  So we made the guy give us another, now we have a VW Caddy which is perfect 🙂 

We drove to Boulogne-sur-Mer and found the graveyard for the allied soldiers from WWI where Reece’s great-Uncle is buried, it was pretty cool for his Dad to see it too (his father and father’s wife are accompanying us as far as Hamburg, I will just call them his parents though, or Bruce and Jill because it’s easier).  It was a mission finding it, there were signs but they seemed to peter out and leave us at a normal cemetary, in the end we parked and got out to look around then some nice French people pointed us in the right direction.

From there we drove to Lille where we were booked into a budget hotel, found a mall over the road with restaurants and I bought some cool Christmas decorations 🙂  Ordering dinner was a shambles, it was just a cafe but Reece’s parents took a long time deciding and couldn’t figure out the menu board behind the counter.  I just grabbed a cold drink from the cabinet and ordered a panini with tomato, mozzarella and pesto (all of which I could understand on the menu), we all had paninis that they toasted for us.  I’ve heard that the French can be quite arrogant and unhelpful towards foreigners but we had a good experience everywhere we went for the 24hrs we were there, although the guy in the cafe thought NZ was somewhere above Scotland!

Next day we drove into Belgium and went to Passchendaele where Reece’s great-Uncle was wounded before he was taken to the hospital near Boulogne.  We didn’t know where to go in Passendaele but found a memorial to the Canadian soldiers and also went to the War Museum which was really interesting.  On the ground floor they have two rooms that are used for temporary exhibitions, quite by chance at the moment it’s on NZ’s involvement in the war around that area so that was really good timing.

After Passchendaele I wanted to go to an Art Noveau museum in Brussels, we decided we still had enough time so I set the GPS navigator to take us to a car park between the museum and the old part of town (in the centre – all these places seem to have an “old town” in the middle where all the cool stuff is).  Traffic was a nightmare once we got into Brussels, there are lanes and markings and lights and pedestrian crossings but it’s just a mess.  Reece was very patient and fought through it but then where we were meant to turn into the car park there was major roadworks and we couldn’t turn around so we just gave up and hightailed it to Westmalle where his friends live.  Having a rental car is great for being able to go odd places like Boulogne and Passchendaele but not so flash for visiting big cities like Brussels, Antwerpen and Amsterdam where the traffic is bad and you have to pay quite a lot for parking (when you can actually find it!).  We are also having to check whether our accommodation in those places includes free parking or whether we’ll have to park on the street and pay, which in Amsterdam was going to be 20-30 Euros ($NZ40-60), even between four of us that’s quite a lot.

Next post – Westmalle – trappist monks, beer, fries, mussels and Bruges.