Travel logs about our trip to Belgium, Netherlands, London and Luxembourg in July 2017.
Introduction
Sometime in May, Lynn was looking over her work schedule and realized that the 4th of July was on a Tuesday this year and that she also had Monday the 3rd of July off, meaning that she would only have to take Wednesday through Friday off to get a 9 day vacation. She immediately emailed me at work to make this disclosure, ending the email with the note, “So where do we want to go?” We explored options over the next few days and checked out airfares and deals for several places we wanted to go, possibly London, or Lisbon or maybe somewhere else. Soon, the airfares pointed the way – Brussels! By taking an airfare and hotel package deal, we could get there reasonably, so we booked the deal and started researching what to do in Brussels and surrounding environs.
The Trip
We decided to use Brussels as our base of operations, since we had booked the hotel as part of the package. However, we did not let that limit us in exploring the area. We decided that in addition to Brussels, we wanted to go to Ghent, Bruges, Waterloo, London via the Chunnel, Amsterdam and Luxembourg. Once there, we had another day available for something else, so we went to Ypres too. Since we went somewhere by train nearly every day, but returned and slept in our hotel in Brussels every night, we began to refer to the trip as our “rail cruise.”
Itinerary
30 Jun – Depart Norfolk in the afternoon.
1 Jul – Arrive Brussels early morning. Walk around on our own.
2 Jul – Tour of Brussels. Train to Waterloo and walk around.
3 Jul – All day tour of Ghent and Bruges.
4 Jul – Eurostar train to London. Walk around.
5 Jul – Thalys train to Amsterdam.
6 Jul – Train to Ypres. “In Flanders Fields” museum and walk around.
7 Jul – All day tour to Luxembourg
8 Jul – Return home.
Click here to start reading the trip journal with the first entry, Stateside departure and Belgium Cities!