Our long weekend started with a delayed eurotrain crossing into France. After a 20min delay, in which Kat and I sampled whiskey shots from the duty free shop, we were on our way. Our first stop of our mini Belgium roady was Bruges where we had our one and only waffle, the first of many beers for the weekend and a sandwich for lunch. It was lovely walking around the canals with the sun shining. It was cool to be in Bruges when there wasn't snow on the ground and we could enjoy walking around the beautiful town.
On we drove to Antwerp - our home for the night. We were pleased we didn't have too much time to spend here as it wasn't overly pretty and there wasn't a lot of touristy things to do. We did however find a really cool underground beer cellar where we spent our evening drinking kwak beer from awesome glasses.
The next morning we headed to Ghent - my highlight of the weekend. Ghent was very pretty and had enough things to do but still left time for beer drinking. We did a city walking tour, looked at the castle, and did a canal cruise in the afternoon. We bought some beers at a local corner shop and drank them back out our hotel which had a nice outdoor area.
We walked back into town for dinner and ate a restaurant that specialised in 'all you can eat' ribs. It was so much fun! I barely managed the one rack that came on my plate, but Nath triumphed, eating 5 racks of ribs in one sitting!
Bank holiday Monday and time to make our way back to London. We stopped at WWI battle sites in Ypres to see trenches and guns, and visited Tyne Cot cemetery which is a Commonwealth cemetery and has the most graves of New Zealand soldiers burried in Europe. After the sobering war visits we found an Abbey that makes the Trappist beer Westvleteren. We had lunch sitting in the garden with great beer & sunshine. The beer can only be bought from the Abbey shop so we bought a box home with us - would be rude not too! A lovely way to end the weekend.
