Here are a few more photos that I was not sure where to put on the other posts.
I suppose this one could have gone with the chocolate post but oh well. Near the end of Saturday night, we made our chocolate purchases and I snapped this photo of Zachary with our Van Oost chocolates.
Question: Do children have some secret schedule for pushing buttons? At least one of them is being rotten at any given moment and it seems SOOOOO rare that the good in them lines up all at once. More often than not it's just one being nice and the others fighting. It was at this moment Charlotte and Zachary got in a fight over seemingly nothing. I imagine that all the Europeans were looking at us judging us for having a larger than normal family. But this is normal. All kids push buttons and boundaries. I just wish it did not happen while out in public like this but such is life.
Moving Zachary along at anything but a snail's pace is very challenging. I think that in part he knows this and probably walks slowly on purpose because he knows that eventually one of us will pick him up. So hand holding is our happy medium. We can pull him along a little faster and he gets to keep walking.
Cannot say enough about how beautiful the city was.
Mom: The stone circular shapes in the upper glass windows are called tracery. The center window has quatrefoil (four leaves) tracery, which represents the Godhead and mankind on earth. Most are pointed straight up like the center example. Steeply pitched hipped roofs sometimes called dovecot roofs in France.
Random note: We are a 2-hotel room family now due to most hotels' fire codes requiring that we have 2 rooms because there are 6 of us. This means we are looking at $150-200 per night no matter where we go. So I have transitioned to Air BnB because we all get one apartment and can feel like we are in a home, usually for less than the cost of a hotel. This time I lined up 2 different Air BnB locations only to be canceled on (the second one the day we were leaving) by the owners. So I went to booking.com and found an apartment in Oostende, Belgium which is 20 minutes west of Brugge. The apartment was right on the coast and should it have been a warm and sunny vacation it would have been a great place to stay. In the end, it was a little out of the way, cold, but still nice to be under one roof. When we arrived they had us sign a contract for 2 days. And check this out! He put our name on the doorbell. So for 2 days, we had property in Belgium! Look at us moving up in the world.
Saturday night did not go smoothly. First the fight in the chocolate store, then our pasta place was closed (owner on vacation). So we drove back to our apartment and found a Mexican restaurant right around the corner. Not cheap but what do you expect when they were importing everything? Glad I spoke Spanish because it was Flemish, French, or Spanish. The kids must have been hungry because Zachary is eating salsa with a spoon.
Cute photo of Camille as arrived in Oostende.
Sunday morning as we started towards Gent, Jari grabbed this photo of this cool tower through the sunroof. Mom: Embattlement with crenels (cut-outs) and merlons (higher wall sections). Also called a crenelated roof or parapets.
It was a 3.5-hour drive home. I just want to say I am grateful for DVD players in the car. It keeps the girls from complaining about being so car sick and helps the time pass while on the road. It was fun to leave in the morning with beautiful sunshine (right after it had hailed on us while I was loading the car) and then to see snow as came up over the mountains into Germany. From 50 degrees to 30 it was actually a nice drive.
Comments