The land of beer and chocolate

This post will be a bit more colorful than the rest. In the craziness of me leaving Montana, I either put the cord for uploading pictures from my camera to the computer with my packed things the movers took, or I've misplaced it. But with my new fancy laptop I can directly put my memory card in the laptop and by-pass the cord situation. So. There will be pictures - FINALLY.

Josh came home exceptionally late on Thursday morning. I was a bit worried, and my worry turned into confusion when he arrived home with two big Starbucks cups. He announced the base had Friday off, so he didn't have to work Thursday night. I was happy about having him home an extra night, and my happiness grew when I realized we could expand our weekend plans. We had talked about doing something for the weekend to spend some time together and get out of the house. The ideas we had thrown around were all local things we could do on Saturday. A friend of Josh's had invited us to make a crazy marathon trip to Austria with him. It was appealing - anything that is a new place for us to see appeals to me - but just too long of a drive with too little time. However it did make me start to think- dream - of farther away destinations rather than just a local trip. Josh not having to work made it possible for us to leave Friday morning, making it a three day weekend. Luckily, Josh agreed that taking a longer over night trip sounded like fun. But where? How far away did we want to venture? Josh first suggested Paris. I panicked and told him I wasn't at all prepared to go to Paris. I'm not sure why, but Paris is THE one place I really want to go. I want to be a nerd, do my research, and plan all the places/sites I want to see. I have not had a chance to prepare for Paris. I did agree that we should aim for something bigger like Paris. Josh then suggested Belgium. I hesitated for a moment. I did, in theory, eventually want to see Belgium. But it wasn't high on my list of priorities. However, within minutes I was able to find a reasonable hotel in Brussels online. Done. We were on our way to Belgium.

Brussels was a surprisingly quick and easy drive - only 2.5 hours, all autobahn. I spent most of the drive "preparing" myself with the Brussels travel book I bought. As I read I discovered we were headed to what looked like a beautiful city with a lot of things to do. After checking into our hotel and getting situated, we walked to the subway and went into the city center. Josh likes to tease me saying I haven't traveled much. His travel and my travel have been different. I traveled a lot as a child growing up, but all of it was in the US. He did no traveling as a child and all of his travel has been international to crazy places with the military. He's much more accustomed to being the "dumb American" who is lost/can't communicate in a different country. I am not, therefore I tend to get nervous about a lot of things in Germany. However. My swift navigation of the Brussels metro system proved him wrong. HA!

Brussels has a beautiful downtown historic area that is easy to walk around, but it also has some sites on different ends of the city. The first thing we stopped to see was the Cathedral. Beautiful inside and out. Outside of the Cathedral there were a multitude of open air tour buses. When my mom and I went to San Fransisco we took one of these buses, and I discovered they are great. You can see an overview of the city and a lot of sites you may want to see, but don't necessarily want to spend time at. All of the buses are also hop on/hop off, so if you arrive at a site you do want to see, you can get off, tour around, and catch another bus later. The bus we took came with headphones that narrated the journey in a variety of languages. It was a good way to get an overview of the area.

The first place we hopped off was at the Atomium. It was build for the 1958 World Fair. You can pay to go inside of it. There are escalators inside of the steel beams that connect the spheres. We went inside... it kind of reminded me of being inside of a giant gerbil toy... not that I'd been inside one before. We hopped back on the bus and finished our tour of the city. We then walked down into the historic area of Brussels. It's a beautiful area with lots of flea markets, food, and sites. I didn't know where to look first.

We had a delicious dinner... followed by chocolate. Chocolate is, obviously, everywhere. Belgian chocolate is EVERYTHING it's cracked up to be. Fantastic. We followed up the chocolate by sampling Belgian waffles. You can find waffles pretty much on any street corner. You can get a plain waffle, or one with whipped cream, whipped cream and strawberries, chocolate and strawberries, chocolate... the list goes on. I got one with chocolate and strawberries, Josh got whipped cream and caramel. They were fantastic. After a bit more walking, we settled down outside a pub and enjoyed the other fine Belgian treat - beer. We were not disappointed.

The next morning we ventured to two museums. They were museums I chose, not Josh, but I chose them because I knew he would enjoy them. The first was Auto World (you can guess what that was about) and the other was the History of the Military Museum. I was actually surprised and impressed by everything they had in the museum. We were there about two hours and could have easily spent more time. Brussels has many museums - over 25 - and I wish we'd had time to see more of them. Josh and I agreed we will have to make another trip back to see more things. We ended our day by enjoying another walk around the historic downtown before returning to our hotel and driving home. Josh had wanted to come home Saturday night to try to get some extra sleep/adjust his schedule back for working nights. We were about 50 kilometers from home when I felt Josh slowing the car down. I looked up from my book to see a wild boar running across the road in front of us. I would say it was the height and length of a large black lab... and must have weighed at least 150 pounds. We didn't hit the boar, but in true Montana fashion Josh began  to speculate what he would do if he had hit it (his plans included putting the - hopefully dead - boar in our trunk to take home and skin).

We had a wonderful weekend trip. I don't know why Belgium wasn't on my radar as someplace I wanted to go, but it is on my list of places I want to go back to. Soon.