An easy drive up from Ghent to Middelburg including the famous (and expensive in a motorhome!) Westerscheldetunnelweg which saves us about 60 km and a trip around Antwerp. It’s one of only two toll roads in the country. The tunnel gets us over(under) the River Scheldt delta and the will be more river deltas over the next few days!
The campsite (Stadcamping Zeeland) is expensive at 25€ a night but is only a 15 minutes walk from the town center. Maybe this price is normal for the Netherlands, we’ll see! The site is quite new so the hedges around the pitches have not grown much yet, but it’s already a lovely site. Super high tech with ANPR cameras raising the barrier once they recognise the number plate.
As we are so close to town, there is no need to get the bikes down on this first stopover!
A brief walk into town and we manage a picturesque town hall, a windmill and a canal, all on the first date. This is a one night stand as we are moving further along the coast tomorrow. We hope that Middelburg is a good omen for the rest of the Netherlands!
Why on earth are you using FB – they are evil data slurping, privacy eroding, advertising behemoths driven by greed and who are just part of the military industrial complex dedicated to laying waste to the planet and turning us further into sheeple blah blah blah?
We already use facebook a lot for keeping in touch with family and friends. We made this page as a way to keep them up to date on what we were up to if they do want to know, but without the constant in-your face stream of pictures of places and descriptions of meals on our personal feeds annoying hard working people 😉
The compromise is to use FB to post the odd photo and links to blog articles which you can find here on the wordpress site.
What you could do is turn FB notifications off and instead occasionally look at the tour map to see where we are and if we have posted anything new: – the tour map is on the front page of the blog.
Our first day out in Ghent was Wednesday 1st. It is Labour day in Belgium and a national holiday. There were various parades, protests, political marches and live music on in the town, so we had all the action in one day! We were treated to a live classical music concert at Sint-Jacobs. We visited the Castle Gravensteen, where we had the most entertaining audio guide ever – Informative and hilarious. Think Henning Wehn and you won’t be far wrong. Lunch was massive bowl of Spag Carbonarra for T and traditional chicken stew for S near the castle. Lunch was accompanied by a Chimay Trappist beer – White for T and Blue for S. Selina might just be getting into hopped beers! (Thanks Jerry for the suggestion!) The afternoon was completed with a walking tour of the town taking in some ore of the wonderful brick based architecture.
Day 2 was pretty damp. We visited the Industriemuseum where we learned the industrial history of Ghent and specifically the textile process. The museum has quite a few fully working machines. Earplugs are provided – although the day after labour day was quiet so the machines were not running. The industrial revolution and the textile industry are inextricably woven together (see what we did there?) and together with the Jaquard concept of programmable cards, you can see a lot of the modern world buried in the history of cotton and textiles in general.
Also we visited the Museum Dr. Guislain at the hospital campus. This is an eclectic mix of art and the history of treating mental illness in Ghent. Pretty interesting stuff. We also had another wander around the town.
Celebrating a small milestone today – Sel’s bike odometer rolled over 500 miles, so she has done pretty well to have gone from not having been on a bike for 40 odd years to having ridden 800km. Great stuff! The size of mothership means that we can’t really take here into town without a lot of planning – parking is a PITA. So the bikes have been invaluable – we can just leave MS at the campsite or aire and take the bikes into town to see what there is to see.
One bike related thing we are having trouble getting used to in Belgium is that scooters are allowed to use the cycle paths. We’ve jumped out of our skins a few times when scooters have been coming straight at us 🙂
Gravensteen. Probably should have just linked to another photo. Seems a waste of megabytes to take a new one – this must be one of the most taken shots in Belgium.
Gravensteen
Trappist Chimay with lunch
Art at the Museum Dr. Guislain
EEG old skool
the art in Graffiti street was underwhelming, it’s pretty much just tags.
