Two for the Road

That’s right, I’m writing this blog from our house in Cardiff. We’ve been home for a couple of days and it’s been a whirlwind of unpacking and reunions. This is probably the last post on our blog (at least for a while) so here’s how we finished off our 8 month jaunt.

We arrived in Brussels on the day of Belgium’s first match in the world cup. As such the Manneken Pis, the city’s most famous statue was dressed for the occasion. We were staying just a minute or two away from it, so thinking he’d be in has garb for a while, I didn’t take a picture. Sadly when we saw him again the next day he’d been disrobed!

After dropping our bags at our flat at the top of a building with alot of stairs and no lift (apparently me booking these has become a trend) we headed out to explore a little.

For those of you who didn’t know, Matt and I met through a university society – the Kent University Real Ale and Cider society to be exact. I don’t think either of us were that interested in beer when we joined up, but after a couple of years each trying every style of beer available, we definitely know what we like. Belgium is famous for its beer and is home to Delirium Cafe, a pub with more beer varieties available than any other in the world. Many of them are Belgian beers and some are Trappist (made with strict regulation by monks).

So we went straight on a little pilgrimage to sample a few of their over 200 beers and get home before the football fans swarmed in.

On our first full day in Belgium, we decided to leave the city and head to Bruges, and hour away by train.

The town was charming, with beautiful buildings, a few breweries to sample and a winding river where students were taking part in some kind of river race of crafts they’d built themselves.

I climbed the belltower in the main square while Matt stayed on terra firma and some 300 narrow steps later got some great views from the top.

The next day we saw a bit more of Brussels, walking past the royal palace, EU headquarters and centennial park. We also enjoyed fries with mayonnaise as is the local way, wrapping up this last stop before heading to the UK.

We took the Eurostar back over the channel, it was great and the journey went very quickly. Before we knew it we were in St Pancras station, where we did the obligatory stop in M&S for some train beers to get us to our final stop before home – Canterbury.

It’s a place close to our hearts as we both went to university there, and it seemed we’d managed to bring the weather home with us as we enjoyed a long weekend meeting up with some old friends and seeing many old haunts. We even finally did the punting tour on the river Stour, something we have always threatened to do but never quite got round to – it was beautiful!

Then it was finally time to go home. We took the train through a London and onto Cardiff reminiscing about our adventure, feeling mixed emotions about it being over but also having some excitement about being at home and back in the land of the familiar.

So there we are, pretty much up to date. What next? Well first we’re trying not to melt on the hottest June on record in the UK, and are spending some time seeing our families and friends.

I am then going on a little bonus trip (solo this time) to Japan and Australia for a month before Matt and I rendezvous in Spain for a last hoorah before I have to go back to work.

Matt meanwhile is currently funemployed, and will be retraining into something new. I’ll let him share more about that if he chooses to continue blogging while I go on my bonus trip.

So that’s it for now, blogs might be a little less frequent but we think we’ll keep them up until we end up firmly back in workaday life in a few months time.

Iris