Summer Holiday Part 1

Our beautiful friends Margot and Sedelle came from Sydney to visit us and spend 2 weeks travelling around France.  We spent the first few days doing touristy things in our home town, including some that we've not done before, like cycling a peddle boat through the canals and taking a horse and carriage from Dam Square through the Negenstraatjes.  It would have been super embarrassing if someone from work had seen me, but fortunately I just looked like another tourist.

Our little travelling family

After picking up our rental car, a nice spacious Opel Zafira which we named Zafira, it was off to Ieper (Ypres) in the south of Belgium. As always, it takes a bit of time to adjust to driving on the opposite side of the road, so we employed all sorts of tricks to make things easier such as blue-tacking a sign to the dash which indicated the difference between left and right turns and the repetition of the phrase 'lefty loosy, right tighty' at every intersection (which, over 1500km, is quite a few intersections, and every one was concluded with the driver happily exclaiming '...nailed it!').  We also had our secret keyword 'banana' which is used to remind the driver to not drive off the side of the road and crash into stuff.  From this arose lots of interesting conversations, such as 'wow, look at that BANANA!', and 'it's pretty cloudy outside, it looks like it might BANANA!'.

Lunch at Ijzendijke- first of many food photos

Our first stop was at a charming little town in the south of Holland called Ijzendijke, which we stopped at to see the windmill that we had spotted from a distance. We had lunch at a cute little cafe while listening to the sound of the church bells, before visiting the windmill.  We were lucky enough to be able to go inside the windmill, because the owner had opened it up to show to a fellow windmill owner who was visiting from the other side of the country.  This man was nice enough to give us a little tour and description of the how this still working mill produces it's white gold.

We had an hour or so in Brugge which we mostly spent in a waffle shop, before the final leg of our first day's driving to Ieper.  As we drove past a rundown old shack, Kate (the GPS) proudly announced to us that we had reached our destination which gave us a bit of a shock.  Fortunately our hotel was the next building along, and it was quite a nice little almost B&B style place.  On the grounds of the hotel was the preserved remains of a small WW1 battlefield, complete with trenches, bunkers and a massive crater in the middle which was the result of the underground tunnel and mining divisions.  This was the first I had heard about this underground warfare, but it was quite a common theme throughout the exhibitions and museums that we visited on the WW1 western front.

Beautiful Brugge

Delicious Brugge

One of the main attractions in Ieper is the Menin Gate Last Post ceremony, which has run every night at 8:00pm sharp since WW1, except for a few days during WW2 when the town was captured by the Germans.  Despite the density of the crowd, the noisy old Scottish guy who would not stop talking and the rude guy who pushed into the middle of our group, it was a moving and atmospheric ceremony, and one could not help but get shivers as the last post echoed off the thousands of names engraved upon the walls.

Menin Gate

During the ceremony

After the ceremony we went searching for a grocery store to buy some dinner, but we were informed by a girl working in a shop that Ieper was 'too small to have any grocery shops' (what do they eat?) so we ate at a little pizza restaurant.

By the time we had finished it was 9pm, but being Europe in the summer it was still light so we went home via the Hill 60 memorial site which was a battle where the 1st Australian Tunneling Division created one of the largest explosions in history beneath the German bunkers.  Now, there is the remains of one bunker surrounded by grassy hills and craters.  Also, we saw a hedgehog.