May 26 – 28 was a spontaneous trip to Brussels,
Belgium. Sean called me on Thursday and
told me had the long weekend so I made a reservation at a hotel, discovered
that the train was not convenient so this was our first trip of more than 1
hour where we drove. I didn’t enjoy
driving nearly as much as the train. Did
you know that they do construction on roads and there are traffic jams (Stuab),
detours and generally loads of cars? I
had forgotten, and was not thrilled with the reminder. Also, parking spaces in Europe are ½ the size
as the US, so parking a US sized Volvo in a Smart car sized parking space it
NOT fun! Search images "
Once
the car was parked, we explored Brussels on foot and it was beautiful, amazing
and delicious! We never did have the
great French fries (invented in Brussels) but we made up for that in chocolate
and waffles. The statue of a small boy
peeing known as “ Manneken Pis” is from 1619 and they have hundreds of
outfits (on display in a museum) for him to wear. There is a King of Belgium, Albert II, was “in
residence” on the day we saw the palace, the flag was flying. We went to the comic strip museum and found
out that Tintin and the Smurfs are Belgian.
Clark was the only one who could read the original comic strips, as they
were in French. But we still enjoyed the
drawings. The architecture is amazing;
one of the city gates had a museum in it and MJ and Clark tried on knight’s
armor. My favorite was an archeological
dig at the Coudenberg, former Palace of Brussels. The palace was there in the 12th
century until destroyed by fire in 1731, and the remains were used as the foundation
for the present palace. Brussles was
also a leading maker of tapestries, now they are a leading seller of them, but
no longer make a lot of them. This was our
first trip with Sean using his new iPhone app Triposo. You can find his comments at: http://www.triposo.com/logs/sean.reilly.963871/trip/Brussels/443Here is the link to the photos from that trip.
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