Getting started

After three days a few things have become self-evident.

1)      Don’t arrive at campsites after the reception has closed (although, if you do, having a baby in the van is a great help to getting people to open up regardless!).
2)      November is quite chilly
3)      When campsites say they are “open all year” it’s only true in a fairly notional sense (though at the first place, we were quite glad the water slides into the lake were closed – just looking at them made us shiver)
4)      If you unexpectedly run out of gas on day one, there is a limit to how much Chinese food you can eat.  Unless you’re Hazel.
5)      Belgium is very flat.  A bit like Norfolk in a lot of ways.
6)      We’ve brought far too much stuff, and not necessarily the right things...

All this aside, it’s been quite fun already.  The Christmas market in Bruges was disappointingly (non-veggie) food based, but the cobbled streets and 14^th century city hall were worth the visit, and Hazel enjoyed the many horse-drawn carriages, bikes and even the unexpected tour group on Segways...

The Belgians we’ve met all spoke Dutch on days 1 and 2, but only 90 miles further west, it’s suddenly all French (leaving Matt and I scrabbling around trying to remember words learnt from school 20ish years ago...).  They have all so far been unfailingly smiley to Hazel, and therefore helpful to us.  Matt has decided that the French-speakers are simply nicer than the Dutch ones, but I think we just understand them more.  And we arrived on a feast day so most people we’ve spoken to at the campsite have been more or less drunk...