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Benelux (Plus) Vacation Recap
For anyone tuning in for the first time, this blog series catalogs a month-long trip, primarily through Belgium and the Netherlands, with a few days spent in Switzerland, Luxemburg, and a smidgen of Germany. Each entry offers photos, observations, and reflections from one traveler after a limited time in each location. Experiences and opinions may…
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Returning to Ghent; Passing Through Breda
Visiting Ghent twice, twenty days apart, was anything but repetitive. A quick review of the first post about Ghent to avoid subjecting readers to too many duplicate photos didn’t even result in removing any images from this series. There’s obviously going to be some overlap when returning to the same place, but a bit of…
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Bruges, Belgium
This small, medieval town in the westernmost province of Flanders leaves an outsized impression. Just twenty thousand residents live in the city center, with another hundred thousand in the surrounding areas, yet 8.3 million tourists visited in 2019. Fortunately, whether due to visiting in the shoulder season or as some continuing effect of the pandemic,…
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Back to Brussels (via Frankfurt)
Readers of the first few entries that discussed Brussels (1, 2, 3) will have seen a plethora of negative commentary about the city with a few notable bright spots. Having learned from the prior visits, a third, brief trip through the city was a vastly-improved experience. Part of that was due to arriving late and…
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Belgium to Switzerland (the slow way)
Brussels is just a 45-minute train ride from Antwerp, but an entire day was dominated by needing to catch a departing bus there at 9:45 PM. That bus was scheduled to arrive in Zürich at 7 AM, four hours ahead of Annette arriving at the airport from the US. Missing it was not an option,…
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A Relaxed Day in Antwerp
On a trip where most days begin with an alarm to move on to the next scheduled destination, staying in the hotel through a rainy morning until 2:30 PM was a welcome luxury. After too many cups of coffee in the lobby while sorting photos and a bit of time relaxing in the room, hunger…
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Antwerp to Lier and Back
Having explored the center of Antwerp on the prior days, it was time to leave the city. Lier was in the overlap between nearby places flagged for a possible visit and those recommended by a native of Antwerp who was working the hotel desk the night before. With a population of just thirty-five thousand, Lier…
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Antwerp: A Day With the Arts
If you missed the first post on Antwerp, you can find an overview of the city and photos from the first day here. Day two started with practical concerns. First up was the hunt for some sort of insole/insert. Despite the shoes being less than a month old, the padding in them couldn’t hold up…
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Antwerp: First Look
As the only city occupying four nights on an otherwise fast-paced agenda, there’s simply too much to share in a single post about Antwerp. Instead, it makes more sense to give a day-by-day account. That will likely mean seeing some of the same locations photographed on different days, but changing weather and the lighting at…
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Dinant, Belgium
There’s a shocking amount of traffic passing through Dinant, but it’s otherwise a sleepy town of less than fifteen thousand residents. Whether due to it being a weekday in the off-season, or because of COVID, many local shops were closed. The main attractions are one of the best photo opportunities on the Meuse (Maas in…