“I’m getting a feeling of de-ja vu…"
Bourne End – Folkestone – Bruges - Breda
Still being jetlagged I was up and wide awake with excitement at around 6 am, I decided to take a stroll down to have a look at Milo in the morning sunlight. He looked glorious. Reassured our steed at least looked cool (and hoping Barrie was correct and he really was good to make it through the 10,000 km we have planned for him) I scurried back inside to make adequate noise banging about to wake Jonathan up.
We carried all of our stuff outside; food, tent, sleeping bags, travel pack, car kit and looked at it… looked at Milo… looked at it… looked at Milo… alright this is going to be a bit of squeeze. Luckily in the haze of jet lag and pure exhaustion the night before we still managed to choose the correct size boxes, they fit perfectly. After assessing what we would need, we packed him up neatly and easily and were on our way, feeling excited for another Hair-venture.
A quick tour of the less pretty areas of England, and a stop at the same rest stop as last year, and we found our way to the Chunnel, I looked at maps and Jonathan napped, yep… we’ve done this before.
Our plan was to try to get to Antwerp in Belgium tonight, but we realized that every single list of must-sees in Europe that we had looked at mentioned Bruges. We had the time and we had promised ourselves we were actually going to see something this trip rather than sprint through countries, so I re-routed us to the city. One of the best parts about smaller European cities is simply that, they’re small. We were able to park right next to the old town and stroll in. It really is beautiful and I can understand why it’s on all the lists, it looks like what I imagined Europe looking like when I was growing up in small town Ohio: all brick buildings with flowers on their balconies, cobblestone streets with little cafés set up and canals with boats rowing couples, and even horse drawn carriages to boot. Being the tourists we are we didn’t do any of that, we really are lazy tourists. We strolled about, took some pictures, had a coffee and sandwich and admired the Europeans’ ability to where trousers of any color, I would feel ridiculous in a pair of red or green pants, but they were casually strolling about like there was nothing to it.
On our way back to the car we noticed a puddle under Milo, we reassured ourselves that it was certainly there prior to our arrival and set off. Then we realized we were just burning through gasoline, we’re talking 150 miles to a tank, no way could we afford this. But it’s an old car… Maybe that’s just the mileage it gets… We refueled and carried on.
We managed to get past Antwerp and just over the Dutch boarder to the next city (4 countries day 1, not too shabby). Jonathan had decided camping for the first night was a bit much for him, he wanted to “ease into it”, so we drove around a city looking for a decently priced hotel room, there was much driving about, and no hotel to show for it, yep we've definitely done this before. After finding a hotel and a lot of googling we realized perhaps that puddle in Bruges was ours and a mechanic may be needed in the morning after all…
Day 2
