Sint Katelijne-Waver (Brussels)

I am NOT a city girl! We cycled to Brussels, the intention being to stop at the Palace gardens for our picnic lunch, but on arrival at the gardens we found someone called Philippe lived there and although you could pay to see the greenhouse for most of the gardens he kept the hoi poloi out. By now I was struggling with the noise of the traffic and the busyness of the roads and we hadn’t even got to the city centre, which is where we headed next. Brussels has some really nice buildings, particularly around the “grand place”. The grand place has been bombed many times including by the IRA but still manages to look magnificent. We didn’t give the city the time it needed. There was a musical instrument museum I would really like to have done and I wanted to see in the parliament building but time simply didn’t permit. I found parliament building a moving experience, I cannot understand nor see any logic to us leaving the EU and the idea that we will plunge the UK into 20 years of shambles into order to “take control” terrifies me .

Our bikes were an issue in Brussels. Usually we tie them up and leave but city bike racks had only a few bikes and any bikes were attached with at least 2 if not more chains, and the chains were big motorbike chains not your normal bike chains. As a result we pushed our bikes around the town rather than leaving them.

We had parked Bertie in Sint Katelijne-Waver in the town hall’s car park, it had 4 spots for motorhomes with a maximum of 72 hours parking (€0 + metered electric and water). The town was nothing great, it wasn’t even good really. Our intention was to cycle to Brussels one day and Antwerp the next as this town was mid way between the 2 and only 1.5 hours cycle to either city. After Brussels we decided to move on and skip Antwerp. Our planned next stop was to be Rotterdam, but having had our fill of cities we pointed Bertie at a small coastal town instead.