Half-day trip to Ghent/Gent/Gand

In honor of Jen & Marco's visit this week, the girls and I (which of course includes Jenee) made a half-day trip to Gent after school on Wednesday. I told the girls we were going to have an adventure! We decided to leave right from school, keeping our fingers crossed that Amelia would nap on the train, so I got to join Jenee at pick up time. A happy consequence of this decision was that I saw Isaac's mom Raquel again, who is very nice, and got to meet Jojo's new friend ("She speaks English, mom!) Aya. We're hoping to set up a play date with her sometime soon.

Anyway, we loaded the girls up onto the tram and when we didn't get off at our regular stop, I told the girls again we were going on a new adventure on a really big train. We negotiated Gare Midi without too much trouble and caught a 1:05 pm (that's 13.05 pm in Eurospeak) train to Ghent (in English)/Gent (in Flemish/Dutch)/Gand (in French). The train ride is only 30 minutes or so but it was enough for Amelia to get mostly undressed, go potty, cuddle up with Jenee and not fall asleep. Jojo and I ate our lunches and looked out the window.

In Ghent, we caught the 1 Tram to the City Center and were pleasantly suprised by some sunshine. I should point out that every day I go to Gent, I take the 21 or 22 Tram away from the City Center so it's not like I know downtown all that well. In fact, I haven't really seen downtown since Dan and I were there in September. Anyway, on the tram, Amelia did fall asleep so we wandered the streets a bit looking at the canals and castles and cathedrals and churches and lovely, very old buildings. We tried to go into one church -- St. Michaels, I think -- but it was closed. Jojo took some photos though, which are in the slide show.

At my urging, we then wandered back to the main square to get a coffee and a treat (inside, nice and warm) while we waited for Jen and Marco to arrive from a morning in the more traditional and popular Flanders tourist destination -- Bruge/Brugge/Bruges. They arrived around 3 pm and, after their snack, we headed to the castle! Dan was unfortunately not able to join us on our outing. He had late afternoon meetings to attend, but also he toured the castle when he and I were here in September so maybe he didn't miss much.

I think the photos speak for themselves. Both girls loved the castle and negotiated all the stairs very well. We didn't get to see the instruments of torture -- which Dan had been impressed and disgusted by -- but given the potential for nightmares in our little group that may have been for the best. The views from the castle rooftop were excellent and both girls displayed an impressive lack of fear of heights, unlike their uncle Marco! You can see them leaning over the ramparts in a few pictures and I'm sure you can imagine them running along the walkways next to a 10-20 ft drop without a care in the world. Just to ensure a happy trip home, we stopped at a chocolatier on the way back to the train station. After an easy train trip back to Brussels and a longer than average wait for a bus back home, we had nice, warm, brick oven take out pizza for dinner.