Day 5 – Thursday – Bruges

A bit of a quiet day today.  We checked out of our hotel this morning, so no more of the lovely Dutch hotel owner making us pancakes every morning.  The car pickup is out at the airport, so for the second and second to last time, we took our bag and tent to the bustop and took the bus to the airport. The public transport from most European airports is easy to use and great value for money.   

This year our convertible is black – Yay, a decent colour for a change.  Driving on the right (wrong-side) of the road, is pretty much second nature, but still the Dutch had a curve ball to throw at us on the very first round about.  For some reason they’d put a second, outer lane that you had to transition into to get off the roundabout.   That was of course the first thing I hit, straight out of the car pickup place, so a couple of extra runs round the roundabout was required before we made it onto the motorway, and headed pretty much straight to Bruges.

Museums are the big thing up in this part of the world, and some are the real deal, which we’ve visited and talked about.  The others, try the imagination to fathom what value one might get out of them, so in order to derive some benefit, we are developing a list of museums we have chosen, for one reason or another, not to visit.  So far the list contains, in no particular order:

-          The bag and purse museum

-          The cheese museum

-          The Frites (that’s fries to you) Museum

-          The Museum Lumina Domestica (the lamp museum)

After 2.5 hours we arrived in Bruges – driving straight into the historic centre. We’ve now checked into our Hotel – the Hotel Aragon, which is very nice, right in the historic heart of the city, and spent a couple of hours catching up on the progress of the Tour de France, before heading out to that most Belgian of eating establishments – el Greko – the local Greek Restaurant.   We enjoy Greek food, and El Greko had created a nice atmosphere with an accopolis looking entrance way, and some nice Greek frescoes on the wall and some vines handing from the ceiling.