Our Blog - AugustTrip - Week 1

Our first full week was spent in a gîte/holiday home near the Belgian border. It was one of several places that are on the grounds of a horse farm, and we had a grass area behind our yard where there are normally horses. This is the closest that Lucy has ever been to a horse and she got more and more comfortable with them as the week went on. The place was a 2-bedroom place where one bedroom and the bathroom was on the ground floor along with an open kitchen/dining room/living room and there was a little 2nd bedroom up a set of stairs in an open mezzanine area. We blocked off the stairs so that Lucy wouldn't go up, since she has a habit of trying to go up stairs when we have them.

Our first dinner was at a restaurant just next door, and we started with a couple interesting-colored cocktails.

We visited a set of towns in both France and Belgium although we skipped a few towns that I had originally planned to visit. Our rationale for coming up north is to find cooler temperatures, but the middle of the 1st week was actually quite hot and so we didn't want to go walking through towns. Instead, we did some morning walks in a nearby forest and then tried to stay cool. Within Belgium, we did a variety of towns, some that were Flemish-speaking and others in the French-speaking. The Northern part of Belgium is the Flemish/Dutch language area and then as you swing South, you get into the French language area. There is also a small section along the German border that speaks German.

Our first stop was the French city of Arras, which dates back to the Romans and has an impressive set of squares lined by houses with a specifically Flemish architecture. We also visited the town of Valenciennes, which is nicknamed the "Athens of the North".

Our second day was spent in Belgium. We started with a guided tour of Chateau Havré before taking a tour through the nearby town of Mons.

Our next stop was the city of Ghent which was the furthest away from where we were staying that we visited this week. We did a nice walk around town, although we did not see the famous "Ghent altarpiece".

We had plans to visit several other towns in France and Belgium, but a heatwave came through and it was a bit too hot to spend all day out with Lucy, so we cut our town visits by about 1/2. But of course, being so close to Belgium, we had to try a "friterie" for Belgian fries. We went with a "large" order, which was a bit of a mistake :-)

Two cities that are located in the metropolitan area of Lille and on the Belgian border, we made fairly quick stops at Roubaix (but not the former pool that we had visited before and Tourcoing, that I didn't know existed until our Volleyball team played against their team.

One last trip across the border into Belgium, for the French-speaking city of Tournai, which is part of an even larger grouping called a "Eurodistrict" with Lille (in France) and Tournai and Kortrijk (in Belgium). As you can guess, a Eurodistrict is basically a cross-border agglomeration in Europe. This Eurodistrict, called the Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai Eurodistrict, was created in 2008.

Then we needed to take Lucy to a vet, as the UK requires a very specific tapeworm treatment, given by a vet, within a certain window of time before entering England. I had e-mailed a vet in Lille and made an appointment. No problems, 30 minutes later, we were done, back to our holiday home, and packing up.

Then we headed to England!