30/6
END OF FINANCIAL YEAR and an easy BAS for Jeff this time!
With our morning routines done, the boys go for a last exhilarating slam at the BMX track. Wil’s planned it all out - which bike we should buy,how it might fit competitive rides into his week…. we need a spare $2 milllion & he needs a few lifetimes to realize all this action! How wonderful to be so excited about living and the future.
We stock Ed with more groceries and program iTomTom for the comic museum in central Brussels.
Thankfully, it’s Saturday as we struggle manoevering through the EU & Belgian capital. Suitably graced with gorgeous statues, monstrous guild halls & palaces, towers, broad plazas, wonderful fountains and parks, it looks like any other grand city. We drive past ‘money’ in clothes, shops & cars broken up by flashes of huge comic murals on thoroughfare walls & in alleys.
The museum is a wonderful art-nouveau building with a really attractively displayed history of Belgium comic geniuses like Herge of TinTin fame, Peyo & his wee blue smurfs and Lucky Luke’s creator………..pity it’s all in French.
Unquenched, we motor 45 minutes south to the student town of Louvain-la-Neuve to explore more specifically, the Herge museum leaving the more sophisticated sights of Brussels unseen!
Unable to find an aire or campsite, we sneakily pull into the leafy carpark of the university’s engineering faculty. It seems there is a year end PowerMix lights & sounds show in preparation on an adjacent oval. Hopefully, we’ll clear out in time tomorrow morning before raising any local irritation. Hopefully the show is not planned for THIS evening!
1/7
OMFG!
It started at 8pm and ‘doofed’ a shattering cacophony until 0330. The kids and Jeff fell asleep(!??) whilst I lay with curled toes & clenched fists telling myself ‘it’s a soothing heart beat; a free concert; this is payment for any previous un-noble act or thought; I’m bigger than this…’ Extreme noise pollution. Ed bounced & vibrated adding a scary jingling percussion line. I tossed from side to side trying to bury one ear & cover the other. My belly & butt cellulite jiggled to the crescendoing pounding & I had to cradle my head holding in my eyeballs & sanity.
OMFG!
Morning came as it always does. Two coffees, school, into town to Herge.
The bright, bold architecturally designed modern Herge museum was quite magical.
Herge Museum
Cartoonist George Remi (G.R or reversed R.G - pronounced ‘Herge’ in French) was born in Brussels in 1907 and pumped out 24 engaging timeless adventure books amongst other art (advertising, journal covers, posters....) Connected to an audioguide each, we wandered, thoroughly absorbed through the story of his life & the treasure trove of original drawings, objects, short films, letters and photographs, each one of us listening to every station.
Lunch in Ed and into Wallonia, the southern, more forested, hilly and prettier half of Belgium. Back to France? Rounding the corner we spot a Decathlon and dash eagerly in for a GARMIN and some shorts. Why buy on the trendy streets of Europe’s fashion capital when you can buy E5 shorts that drip dry in 10 minutes? Ahh, the sound of spoken French.
With a countryside dotted with castles, we choose just one stop, Dinant, a tiny Belgian town nestled on the right bank of the broad, once home to Adolphe Sax who invented the instrument. The mighty Muese river against a high cliff surmounted by an ancient ruined fortress - the Citadel. It all tells of times of battle but with the bridge decorated with rows of over-sized playfully coloured saxophones, flower pots hanging from windows & lining walkways, bright flags of all European nations dancing in a gentle summer breeze and more than 3 boulangeries puffing their wonderful aromas through the cobbled streets, now it’s just joyful.
into Dinant
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| Citadel on the hill |
We make for the true Belgian speciality of twice fried frites and are served monstrous cones of golden sticks to munch as we enjoy the sunshine,
windows full of enormous ginger bread biscuits moulded in various shapes & scenes and the spectacle of chess-piece like rooks tucked up on the forested cliffs, bulbous steeples and bronzed art work resembling all manner of things saxophone.
Our resting place for the night is a town called Rochefort where Jeff hopes to source some abbey trappist beer. Once landed, we jump on our fiets picking up 2 bottles of golden ale & then proceed to amuse ourselves tasting & analysing it over card games.
Our batteries are recharged with a wonderful sleep in this pretty, small town’s carpark.
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