3 October 2019

We still had a little unfinished business in Brugge.

We visited yet another church (Basilica, actually) and I think it might be my new all time favourite.

“The Basilica of the Holy Blood” is said to house a relic of Jesus’ blood and therefore is a biggie on the pilgrimage circuit. The downstairs bit was ok but it was the upstairs bit I really liked.

And it had an alien mushroom style pulpit which is pretty cool and definitely puts it in first place for contender in the best pulpit category this trip.

Attached to the Basilica was a little museum filled with nice things including a lot of references to the relic being passed on from someone to someone else before finding its resting place in Brugge.

In order to balance our ying and yang, our good versus evil, our next stop was a brewery.

Not just any old brewery, a very old brewery, with its own beer pipeline from the inner city to the bottling factory 3 or 4 kms away. Rather than have big trucks rumbling in and out and clogging up the streets, they invested €4 million, to dig down through the cobblestones and under heritage listed buildings to deliver their brew to the outskirts of town.

We did the maths and figured we had time to have a quick lunch before heading to the train station. We had a date with a P&O ferry at Zeebrugge.

Sadly the cafe staff were not operating on the same schedule as us and it ended up a stressful and rushed journey to Station.

We missed the train by 5 seconds. Literally. Grahame was pushing the button to open the carriage as the train pulled away!!

The next train was in an hour and we still had time, so the inconvenience frustrating rather than disastrous.

The ferry was fun. We dumped our bags in our shoebox of a cabin and went in search of all the shipboard fun. Found the bar instead!!

Bye bye Belgium. Bye bye Europe! (well not technically til the end of this month, but you know what I mean.) You were “amazing”!!!