The last time we were in Bruges was in 2002 when we visited with our three kids. When we were ready to leave, Annie and I walked to retrieve our car and we planning to pick up Lorie and the other kids back at the hotel. Bruges is a very small town, but we got incredibly lost and turned around. There was no GPS back then, and my phone was a flip phone with no map. It took about an hour, as I recall, to find the hotel. Lorie, Jarett and Haley had tucked into some second breakfast by that time.
Move ahead 21 years and we headed out of town with two powerful GPS units on the bike, pre-programmed with a route, and two phones with amazing maps. Guess what? Yeah, we got incredibly lost. The roadway was being worked on and that really goofed us up. But we eventually sorted out a rather circuitous route and got back on track.
I have not included many photos taken during our daily rides. The reason is that with one arm, Lorie can't take photos and ride at the same time. But today we took some photos on the road. Most of the day was ridden on ice-smooth tarmac paths along canals, and we saw maybe 3 or 4 other riders in the first 50 km.
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| Beautiful, shaded cycle paths |
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| Alongside picturesque canals |
Nearing the French border we found a small village just outside of Middlekerke. There was a cafe waiting for us. Middle-coffee!
Back on the path we paused to allow a bunch, herd?, of goats to mosey out of the way. They were awfully cute.
And even though we have lots of navigation aids, we still get lost every single day. Really. We eventually figure it out but it can be a challenge sometimes. Here we are lost in De Panne, France, checking the instruments to figure out where we went wrong.
As we neared the southwestern corner of Belgium and approached Dunkirk, we started seeing some of the many war memorials for the fallen soldiers of both World Wars. This area was of course ravaged in both wars and the human toll was extraordinary. In Flanders Fields, indeed.
We stopped at the Dunkirk Commonwealth Cemetery just on the outskirts of town. Buried there are thousands of French infantrymen who died in WWI and thousands of Allied soldiers who died in the infamous Battle of Dunkirk. There were 400,000 Allied troops in Dunkirk when the Allied commanders realized that they needed to evacuate back to England. With the help of hundreds of civilian boats from England, amazingly, some 350,000 were successfully evacuated. Still, that left an astonishing death toll. It is difficult to wander through the rows of headstones and read some of the inscriptions. Kids, mostly, who had so much in front of them.
And we have not made much progress since.
When I was a little kid we had this odd vase that we called the "Dunkirk" vase -- it was also sometimes called the "Verdun" vase; both battlegrounds in World War I. My grandfather brought it home from France, where he served in WWI -- it was a fairly large bomb shell casing that had been tooled into a pretty vase. A thing of beauty from a thing of horror. Dunkirk and Verdun are widely separated in France, but both were the sites of horrific battles in WWI. As we rode into Dunkirk today and I couldn't help thinking about that vase and its origins.
Today, Dunkirk isn't all that much to look at. It is, sadly, a bit decrepit. We are staying in a decent AirBnB and are just ticking off the miles. That said, the food in amazing as only can be found in France! Boulangeries and cafes on every block. And very good wine is silly inexpensive; it is hard to find a bottle for more than 4 euro. I guess you know what we're doing tonight.
A demain.
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