Friday – April 27,2012

We awoke, amazingly, to a beautiful blue sky, not a cloud to be seen.  Clearly a day for sightseeing.  After a very nice breakfast (included with the hotel room) we headed off to the city of Ypres (also spelled Ieper) to look for Flanders Field, a famous battlefield in World War I.  It is the center of the horrible trench warfare that kept the Allies and the Germans locked up for years with dreadful loss of life.  At the entrance to the city, there is a memorial called the Menen Gate that has inscribed over 50,000 names  of men who died in the battles.  There are military grave yards all over the area.  The city itself feature a beautiful town hall and impressive cathedral. It was hard to believe that these ancient buildings had survived both World Wars because World War II was fought right there too.  In fact, they hadn’t.  Following WWI, the local citizens, with significant financial aid from outside had rebuilt the town, not modern like many places in England were rebuilt after WWII, but rather they were rebuilt in their original style. 

After Ypres, we decided to go to France for lunch.  Yes, we were so close to the border that if was only about a 30 minute drive to Lille.  We basically just wandered around looking for a place to eat.  Having the GPS made it easy since I knew we could just let Maggy get us out and to our next destination.  We ended up stumbling on the town square and were able to park in an underground lot right under the square.  We came up to a beautiful area with shops and restaurants all around us.  Maxine picked a small cafe that served us a nice lasagna lunch including salad and dessert at a very reasonable price.  The GPS quickly got us out of town and on our way to Waterloo.  If you’ve seen one historic battlefield, you might as well see two.

We are approaching the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo in 2015.  Much of what they have was built for the 100th.  There is now a proper visitor center showing two excellent films, one purely historical going over the actions of Wellington and Napoleon and one extracted from a feature film that attempts to provide an insight into what the heat of battle must have been like.  After that, we went outside to see the Lion Mound Monument.  It was built in the early 1800s to commemorate not only the battle itself but the thousands who died in the battle.  For the centennial they build a diorama that is still a powerful vision of what happened 200 years ago.

The traffic back to Brugge wasn’t too bad and we went to an early dinner at a close by place.  Again, an excellent dinner in the Flemish style.  I had a very nice chicken stew, while Maxine had very traditional steak frites.