Trip to Pick up Ryan - Ghent, Belgium

We boarded our plane to Paris and took a selfie to send to the kids. It still feels a little surreal that we’re headed to Europe. I was tired so I immediately slept for an hour. We slept on and off during our 9 hour flight. When we got to Paris, we picked up our bag, waited too long for our rental car and then got on the road heading out of France and into Belgium. I remember saying to Chris that everything seemed more vivid in Europe. Our views of green fields and blue sky stretched on forever. So exhausted, I got Chris set up with an audio book and I took another one hour nap - which felt so good.

One way streets with signs in Flemish make driving tricky but we drove into Ghent, Belgium and found a place to park - an underground parking structure. We quickly changed into new clothes and got ready to spend the evening walking around this new town.

Chris and I loved this graffiti alley — a place designated especially for graffiti to keep other places in the city clean. It was really cool to walk through and explore.

I love the rooflines and the different gables of each building. The main square along the canal was beautiful. Fun to walk around with Chris and meander through streets and alleyways taking pictures and commenting every few minutes about how good it felt to be back in Europe. The cobblestone streets, flowers and bikes.

With all the ‘fry’ places around we thought we’d try that for dinner. With mayo and ketchup and a fork of course. We sat down on the edge of the canal to eat. Rick Steven verified my thought: French fries aren’t French, they’re Belgian.

We visited the outside of several churches and read some info on a few buildings, but mostly we just wandered.

SO happy to be back in Europe! Cobblestone alleyways, gelato, colorful flower boxes, wonderfully historic architecture… feels like I’m home.

We loved the new structures, quaint old streets and back canals lined with bikes and flowers and a chocolate store. Definitely a great first stop and fun to visit a city we haven’t been to before. We laster longer than I thought we would.

We headed to the parking garage after we had logged 14,500 steps (almost 8 miles) but the meter wouldn’t read our American credit card so we headed off to find an ATM — and then the meter wouldn’t take a 20 Euro bill so then we headed off to find gelato. Finally we got in our little car and drove the 45 minutes to Brugge.