And so, all good things must come to an end. We fly out tomorrow, Paris to Toronto, and, God willing, will be sleeping in our own beds by 10:00 or 11:00 tomorrow night. We did not want to risk train breakdown, train strikes, etc., so we came into Paris today after a leisurely morning in our Brussels hotel. We got into our Paris B and B a little before 4:00, and so that left us with a little time for sightseeing and exploring.

When in doubt, I like to walk in cities. If I do not have a specific destination, or if I am not in a hurry, I like to walk so that we can see the city on foot. In so doing, we stumbled across a pedestrian street full of restaurants about four blocks from our B and B. We ate a late lunch there, outside, and got in some good people-watching.

Sadly, my illness flared up and caused me some distress, so we had to go back to the B and B until a little after 5:30. By then, I was feeling better, so we went back down the same street to the pedestrian area, and we kept heading south toward the river. My plan was to get to the Seine, then turn west to go to a large formal park near the Louvre. Along the way, we stumbled across multiple pedestrian areas, including a small square where tons of people were just hanging out (or, in one area, having a dance-off among friends).

Once we got a block from the river, we went west, which brought us along the back side of the Louvre. We had never seen the museum from that angle before, and it is quite elaborate, with carved columns and decorations along the entire wall. And it just goes on. And on. And on. I finally felt we had to duck into the main courtyard to see the famous entrance of the museum, and discovered that the courtyard bordered the park I was aiming for, the Jardin des Tuileries.

Imagine our delight when we saw not only dozens of classical-style statues, and miles of well-kept hedges, and multiple large fountains, and myriads of people everywhere, but also, along one side of the gardens, a with-rides fair set up. We obviously detoured into that area; it was a great chance to get to see Paris at play. It was also odd to see these large fairground rides throwing people about with one side of the Louvre as a backdrop. We laughed with people laughing at their friends screaming on rides, and navigated fried-food lane and many win-a-prize stalls. It was much fun.

The fair dumped us out on the far end of the park, which overlooks the Paris obelisk and, further away, the Arc de Triomphe. It was a great place to sit and watch, so we did just that. The city has provided many movable chairs around the park, including some that recline, so we reclined and watched Paris go by. By the time we got up, it was after 7:00, and so we took a very very crowded Metro train back to our B and B. From there, we wandered around looking for supper, and then wrapped the evening up a little after 9:00.

It has been a great little trip. I look forward to these times away with Meredith – it breaks up the routine of bills, chores, and grading. Two weeks together is wonderful, though I am looking forward to some routine now, especially one involving petting kitties at home. We saw several Belgian cats, but they were too wary to come close enough for to us to pet them, so we are both going through withdrawal. It will be great to see the people back home, once the jet lag wears off (I’m usually fine by day three, which will be Monday). It is amazing to live in an age where you can go from Paris to Cuyahoga Falls in about twenty-one hours, and I am grateful that Mer pushes for our going on these trips. Every time, they keep us wanting to come back for more.

I have now been on over fifteen trips to Europe with Meredith over the last twenty-two years or so. In all that time, I do not remember getting sick on the trip; I have gotten sick several times after the trip, but not during it. That streak ended on this trip, but happily, the touring could continue, just at a more subdued pace. I have been feeling off since Monday morning, but today was tougher. I could tour, but got tired very quickly, and so we came back to the hotel twice during the day for me to rest. It was difficult to get up the energy to go out for our evening jaunt, but I managed, and it was a good day of touring.

We stumbled onto a Brussels tradition – Ommegang (Flemish for “walking around”). The Ommegang festival used to be a religious procession, but fell out of favor around the time of the French Revolution, which frowned on such things. It was brought back as a historical celebration in 1930, and now commemorated Charles V and his son visiting the city in 1549. The “king” leads a parade of fourteen hundred in-costume people through the city, ending in the Grand Place (the main square), where they have a two-hour-long show which includes medieval lights and fog machines. It only happens two days a year, and this year that was today and Friday. It seemed as if we should make the effort to catch some of the festivities.

Part of the celebration is a small Renaissance faire in one of the city parks. They have a small “village” with people selling wares, and some people explaining life from the 1500s. They also have combat demonstrations and a jousting tournament. And it was all free (although donations were accepted by individual re-enactors).

Since the village did not open until noon, it left us with some free time, so we headed over to the area to go to the remains of the Coudenberg Palace, which was an enormous palace built over five hundred years, that burned down in 1731. The ruins were torn down to build a new grand square in 1774, and it was mostly forgotten about until the 1980s, when the ruins were excavated. Once the foundations, cellars, and even part of a road were unearthed, the city covered the site with a concrete roof and opened the site up to the public.

In addition to the appeal of ruins underground, there was an advertised exhibition on giants, which sounded intriguing. The website said giants have a special place in the lowland countries, especially Belgium. I was up for that.

The ruins of the castle were impressive, and the cobblestone road that was uncovered shows the original slope of the steep hill that existed before it was leveled to make the new square. That was all interesting to me. What surprised us both were the giants – it is a term used to describe the large mannequin puppet people you see in Mardi Gras parades in New Orelans. It seems they have been really popular in Belgium for a very long time. So we got to see a bunch of oversized people scattered about the ruins of the old palace. It was a bit surreal. It helped explain some of what we had seen around the country; we had seen some giants in the psychiatric hospital art museum in Ghent, and we had seen three of them when we exited the cave near Dinant. We’d thought they were fairly random, but it seems they have an important place in the festivals of Belgian cultures. We even got to see one of the giants being prepared for the parade later in the evening. The Coudenberg Palace experience ended with a small museum, and we were through the whole place in a little over an hour, and so we went back to the park to see how the village was coming along.

Not very promptly, as it turns out. It seems “noon” is a rough time for these sorts of things, so we went back to the hotel for the first rest of the day. We returned to the park around 3:00, and things were more lively. It was a small village, and, different from Renaissance faires in the US, the normal civilians were not in costume – only the actors were. You would think a faire like this in a city that was actually around in 1500 would be bigger, but maybe people are too close to the history Americans don’t have. It was small. We did get into a long conversation with a “monk” who told us how a barber would have repaired a badly healed broken bone (in an unpleasant two-hour operation that involved cutting into the leg, scraping out any fat, moving the muscle, and then manhandling the bone back into place). It would have been for only the rich, and people only survived the surgery half the time. He was fun to talk to, and his English was pretty good.

It was 4:00, and we had found out earlier that the Magritte Museum, which was very close by, was free today after 1:00, so we went there. I had liked what I’d seen of Magritte at the Atomium yesterday and wanted to see more. After blitzing though all three floors of the museum in forty-five minutes, I still liked much of what I saw. Magritte seems to me to be playing with minds a lot – he does things that can’t be seen in the real world, like a painting being half in the day and half in the night, or the background of a painting being full of trees growing upside down. A few paintings were just odd or did not click with me, but on the whole, I liked Magritte’s work.

I looked on the map and realized that to take the Metro required us to walk away from our hotel about fifty percent of the actual distance to the hotel, so we took it as an opportunity to walk the city. We stumbled across a small park that was perfectly manicured, across from the church where the procession would meet up with the “king” later in the day. That ended part two of the day. I got back to the hotel and lay down, and after another hour, it was hard to go back out, but we both really wanted to see the Ommegang procession. Off we went, at a bit of a weary pace.

We swung by the huge and fantastically-named Palace of Justice to look out over the city. We could see the Atomium from there, and the city had even put out lawn chairs for people to hang out on the square. It seemed to be a popular place with the under-thirty crowd. We walked up toward the upper town until we got to the church, where we just caught the various guilds marching into the church. I did not know it was open to the public, so we found a spot on the road to wait for the pageant.

It was fun. The king and his guard led the way, followed by a modern street-sweeper to clean up after the horses. That was followed by a drum and fife group, and color guard throwing flags in the air, and crossbow men and musket bearers and small bands of instrumentalists and lords and ladies and commoners, and, wait for it, four or five giants. That was satisfying. Everyone seemed to be having a good time, and we were glad we had made the effort.

We grabbed a quick to-go supper and ate in our room while watching an obscure American film; we were enjoying the Flemish subtitles.  I’m hoping today will be the toughest day of being sick, so that I can have more energy as we leave Belgium for Paris tomorrow, and then home via Toronto on Friday. Belgium has been very good to us, and I am not sick of it at all.

I have seen the future, and the future is 1958, which helps explain my lack of flying car. Since I was stuck on the ground, I allowed three hours for us to get our car to the Brussels train station to return it to Hertz, so that we would not get charged for an extra day. Since the car was due at 11:00, we left at 8:00. Normally, the trip from Dinant to Brussels is about an hour and twenty minutes, so I thought we were playing it pretty safe. Queue up the construction traffic jam, and my meandering attempt to get around it, and throw in circling the train station a few times trying to find where the car rental place was, and stop to ask a cab driver to help, which he very kindly does, pointing out the postage-stamp-sized sign of where to return the car, and find that the car return agent for Hertz is nowhere to be found for several minutes, and you return the car at 11:03. Happily, they did not charge us for the extra day. And so, we bid goodbye to the rental car, which is always a relief. I love the flexibility of a car, but am always anxious driving it in other countries where I can’t read the signs and I don’t know the conventions.

Since we were relying on the kindness of strangers to find the car rental station, we were blessed to have another kind man stop on the street when he saw us struggling with our map. He saw where we were trying to get to and told us where the metro was and which stop to get off at. He then wished us well and went on his way. What a great guy.

So, we checked into our four-star swanky hotel. I had some credit on the travel site Orbitz, so I used it to get us into a 390-euro-a-night hotel. Sweet. So, of course, they did not have my booking. It turned out my name was spelled incorrectly, and it was fine. I’d expected they were running a credit check on us and seeing that we didn’t really belong in such a hotel. It is a nice room, but it is funny how at the end of the day, it is just a bed and a bathroom, although the room does have a weak air conditioner. I’m used to American freeze-you-out air conditioning, and this one has been running for about ten hours now and has just kept the room at the same temperature (about 79 degrees).

Since I had slept little last night because of Belgian national exuberance over World Cup play, and because I was feeling a little sick, I took an hour-long nap, which also helped us get into the later afternoon, which is when things could start to cool down. We headed to the northwest part of the city on the Metro, to go see the rather amazing Atomium.

The Atomium is a sixty-year-old structure left over from Brussels’s 1958 World’s Fair. It is a giant atomic model mirroring the structure of an iron crystal. It was the central showpiece of the fair, and it is still pretty cool. It is 330 feet tall, and not only can you take an elevator to the top to the observation level, but you can also climb around inside five of the atoms as well. Most of the atoms tell the story of the 1958 World’s Fair. Some fun facts – forty million people came thought the fair; more than forty nations participated; and eight out of every ten Belgians went through the exhibition. It’s a pretty great exhibit.

Two levels were showing some of the work of Magritte, a Belgian artist best know for a painting of a man wearing a bowler hat, but with an apple hiding his face. It was really interesting, and the exhibit brought out how Magritte was fascinated with the hidden – hidden faces, hidden scenery, and so on. Just knowing that little bit of information really helped me understand his work on display, and I really enjoyed it. Mer and I were even able to pose for Magritte-esque photos.

Most of the atoms were connected by escalators, and you could generally look out a porthole to see the connecting structures and the spheres. One of the escalators was wildly lit with pulsating colored lights, and even the normal staircases felt like you were moving around a space station. There was even one sphere set up with sphere-shaped beds to accommodate school sleepovers.

After a brief stop back at the hotel, we went to the area around the main old square, where we found a crepe restaurant and had supper. Afterwards, we took advantage of the evening air to do a book-guided walk around the square area, looking at the main hall and its tower, the gilded decorations of the old trade guilds, the first glass-roofed shopping arcade built in Europe, a recently cleaned church that I would have sworn looked as if it had been built in the last hundred years, and the main shopping streets all around – all pedestrian-only zones. There were people everywhere, and in the main square the town was setting up seating and lights for a concert series over the next few days. It was a lively scene. And yes, we did see a very small statue of a small boy peeing in a fountain.

That took us back home, where we watched the end of the England-Columbia World Cup game – it was on in all the bars, so we decided to check it out. England won on penalty kicks.

So, if I saw a little bit of the 1958 future, it was worth the trip out to the site. Our immediate future should hold some more good touring of Brussels tomorrow.

When Mer announced five years ago that she wanted to go to each of the European countries covered by tour guide Rick Steves, she left the yearly picking of each country up to me. So I picked Belgium this year, and I don’t remember the specifics as to why. I think I wanted a small country for less driving. Check. I wanted a flat country, since we have spent the last five summers in hilly or mountainous country. Flat – check. I wanted somewhere cool, because I do not feel well when it is really hot (above eighty, and especially above eighty-five). The normal temperatures of Belgium this time of year are in the mid-to-high sixties, so that is perfect. Except we have had unusually hot temperatures on this vacation, several times reaching eighty-three or eighty-four degrees. The hot weather has also brought tons of sun, so we have had no rain in a region where it usually rains half the days. So that has been a solid trade-off, but it has meant managing our touring to keep me from getting sick from the heat.

So we started this morning off driving to the nearby Jardins d’Annevoie (the gardens of Annevoie). It was still cool at 10:00 when we got there, and Mer was not sure what we were doing when I pulled into the parking lot. It was a gravel lot looking up at a small farmhouse. She was wondering why we would drive to see a farmhouse; however, the gardens were across the street, and she was okay once she got a glimpse of them.

In the interest of getting going in the morning, I had us skip breakfast, knowing we were going to a tourist attraction that should have a cafe. They did, and I was thrilled we had waited. We had breakfast on our private balcony (no one else was there yet), looking out over one corner of the gardens. It was delightful.

When I say “gardens,” you need to picture manicured grounds and not just flowers. The gardens date from about 1760, and shrubs and fountains and paths were valued. There were some flowers, but what brought me to these gardens were the descriptions of the water features. The gardens have water everywhere, and it is all gravity-fed, so the fountains and brooks have been flowing continuously for 250 years.

The results are spectacular. I love water, and so this is hands-down my favorite garden anywhere, and that includes Versailles. Fountains fed pools which fed other fountains which fed streams, all in a park-like setting with trees (some 250 years old) and hedges and arbors and nooks and statues. It was largely shaded, so the sun was not an issue. They had multiple swans, including a black one, and we kept hearing a peacock, although we never saw it. We walked around the grounds for two hours, and we were pretty much by ourselves. We saw six other people, but four of them were as we were leaving, and the other two were so far ahead of us we only saw them twice, at a distance. It was right out of a Jane Austen novel, from which I quoted freely in order to impress my beloved (it is important to stress to ladies of certain breeding the importance of learning and discourse). I enjoyed Ghent and Bruges, but this was very different, and the peace of the gardens was quite welcome.

We headed back to the hotel room for a cheap take-out lunch in our little kitchen overlooking the Meuse. That made me sleepy, so we hid from the afternoon sun for forty-five minutes while resting in our room. It was still hot out when we left around 3:00, so there was only one thing for it to escape the heat – go underground.

Two summers ago, when we were in Austria, we were having unusually hot weather then as well. Mer took me on a tour of a salt mine, and it was one of the most wonderfully cool (both senses of the word) moments I had in Austria. It made quite an impression. So, when researching things to do in this area, when I saw we could go to a cave, I remembered Austria. It is a great way to get out of the heat. When I considered that I was, for the time being, castled and museumed out, and saw it was a hot day, we were going caving.

The Grottes de Han (the Caves of Han) are in the town of Han, about thirty minutes from Dinant. I expected to pull up to a parking lot in front of a cave. Instead, we came to the center of Han, which is not big, but is not just a crossroads. It seems the cave had been a tourist attraction for over two hundred years. After finding parking a couple of blocks away, we walked back to the center, where we could buy tickets for the cave, the safari park, or both. We then waited twenty minutes for our train to take us to the cave entrance, about a mile-and-a-half away. It is possible that the train may have been in use for two hundred years as well; it was rickety and loud, and it was a ton of fun. It ran us along the local river (the Lesse), past a small campground, and through some forested hills.

We had a fairly small group of about dozen people, and we circled around the guide. Who spoke French. And then moved on. Seemed as if I was going to be a bit clueless on the information of the cave. Mer translated what she could for me, but the cave acoustics were prone to echoes, and the guide spoke quickly, so Mer did not always catch much. But that was all right:  we were headed underground, where we would need light jackets, and it was going to be full of rock formations, and an unexpected-to-me underground river, happily called the Styx.

The cave is unusual in that it is a fairly horizontal cave, with little vertical change. There is a hill on top of the cave, so the cave gets deeper while staying fairly level. Part of the river had run through the cave at one point, and parts of it still flood from time to time. It is made of of several huge chambers connected by small passageways. There were limestone columns that were twenty or thirty feet high, and gentle and delicate lace-like formations of deposited limestone, twisting back and around on itself like fabric.

We crossed the river several times, and it was fascinating to see the water flowing with vapor coming off the surface. The entire cave was well lit with LED lights, and the guide would turn them on and off to highlight certain parts of the chambers we were in. The lights off the water were lovely.

In one large chamber we entered, they had small cave-drawings of animals projected on the walls, with projected fires burning in front of them. I saw the projectors, and they were large and high-end, so I was curious about that, since a smaller and much cheaper projector could have done the same thing. Then the guide had us sit down on chairs, and she turned down the lights, and the entire front half of the cave became a huge screen, with laser light show included. It was a stylized computer-generated film of the cave, from the Big Bang to the present day, somehow all tied to a stag running around. It was really impressive, and explained the need for the projectors. I don’t think it had much of anything to do with the cave, but it was really entertaining.

In the largest cavern, the guide took us about halfway up to a landing, and then sang two notes. Way at the top of the cavern, a torch appeared, and it was run by a teenager down to us. Because I do not speak French, it was not clear to me if that is where early explorers came in, or what was the origin of the torchbearer; it seemed it was a tradition that until 1989 was still done with a real torch. They stopped that because of the smoke pollution in the cave. It is now done by a fairly-effective LED torch instead.

The tour finished with a long stretch of elevated walkway along one of the underground streams, and took us out into daylight. We were a five-minute walk from town and our car, so we headed home for supper in our kitchen.

Since today was the Belgium-Japan World Cup game, and it was an elimination game, we walked down after dinner to a small town square where the town had a large screen set up for the game. The square was jammed with people, and included a for-locals Belgian waffle stand. We watched about twenty minutes of the game, and Belgium was clearly dominating, but could not score. We went back to the room and could tell by noise levels what was going on. Japan scored two quick goals in the second half to go up 2-0, and Belgium finally tied things up in the last fifteen minutes. Then, four minutes into bonus/injury time, Belgium scored and the place went nuts. Then, two minutes later, the game ended, and the place went really crazy. It is kind of fun to be in a World Cup country, assuming I can get any sleep tonight.

So, here it is, about 10:30 pm, and the evening is cool again. Based on the honking horns and cheering people, they are pretty happy that the heat of the day is over too. Tomorrow, on to Brussels. I’ve loved Dinant – I could have spent another day here easily, and maybe even two more. It is a lovely part of Belgium. Our guide in Ghent had found out we were going to Dinant, and she asked me what we were going to do after the first hour and a half. And here I never even managed to get up to the citadel in town. Next time.

PS – I forgot to mention – when we left the hotel this morning, we saw a guy walking along with a backpack. That was not unusual, but what was amazing was the black cat sitting on top of his backpack, just riding along. It was really cute.

Sometimes, I do judge a book by its cover. When I was researching places to go during my time of being in charge in Belgium, I had decided on going to the southeast of the country to the area around Spa (the town responsible for the English word “spa”). Somehow, when I was looking something up, I saw a picture of Dinant, with colorful houses, a large stone church, and a towering cliff with a fort on top. As soon as I saw that, I changed all of my plans. That is how we ended up in Dinant today after a two(ish)-hour drive from Bruges.

Our hotel is great – a small four-room place with a common kitchen that has large windows that overlook the River Meuse. We might be seventy-five feet from the water – just a street and cafe seating away. The only downside is that because our room faces the river, it also got the full afternoon sun, so it felt as if our room was at least eighty degrees. It is not surprising that a country that is usually in the upper sixties in July does not have air conditioning, but it was hot. Happily, the owner got us a fan, which will work with Belgium’s cool nights.

After a quick lunch in our convenient hotel, we took a two-hour river cruise on the Meuse. We headed upstream, and the countryside ranged from pleasant (gentle hills and cute houses) to amazing (sculptured gardens and sheer cliffs with people climbing on them). We got to go through a modern-day lock that brought us up about six feet to the higher stretch of the river, and I loved that. We stayed in the shade on board, which was a good thing on an intensely sunny day like today, and we were entertained by the ramblings of several little girls running around chattering in French. The cruise was a good use of time, and helped rest our legs that had been walking about eight or nine miles a day this vacation.

By the time the cruise had ended, it was too late to climb up to the citadel. It was 5:00, and the fort closed at 6:00. We do not generally like to rush through touring things. So, instead, since I had a car, we drove about five miles to the nearby town of Yvoir, up into the hills along one-lane roads, to get to the ruined fortress of Poilvache, which had been destroyed by an army around 1430. It had commanding views of the Meuse and countryside, had ruined towers and parts of a defensive moat, and it closed at 6:00. We got there at 6:05. Happily, a very polite man told us to feel free to take pictures from the lookout next to the cafe, but we did not get to see the castle itself. Maybe tomorrow.

Back in Dinant, we walked to and over the Saxophone-speckled Pont Charles de Gaulle bridge, where you get amazing views of the town and citadel. Why saxophones? Albert Sax, the inventor, was born in Dinant, so there are large saxophone sculptures everywhere.

We followed signs to the 23 August 1914 memorial. Dinant was on the front line early in WW I, and Germany’s advance was checked in this area by French troops. In retaliation, the Germans accused the town of being French supporters, and promptly executed more than six hundred men, women, and children, before sending the remaining men off to a concentration camp. The memorial is a diamond-shaped tunnel of iron with the names of all the victims cut into it backwards, so they can be read correctly as you walk through the memorial. On the outside, in normal text, are multiple quotes in French about peace. It was very moving.

We walked back into town and got take-out food for supper. Why pay for the restaurant view that we already have? We have all day tomorrow to explore the region before I close the cover of the Dinant book that has opened so well (assuming we find things open, that is).