Bruges …..Again

A more relaxing day was enjoyed in Belgium today, no near misses, no close shaves and nothing went wrong ~ so far

Maybe I spoke too soon !

I couldn`t post the blog last night as my data card had run out of data.

I managed to resolve that problem today by buying a local data sim, but it only has limited data so probably no photos until I can get some free wifi data.

The next problem is a bit more tricky to resolve. It looks like the leisure battery died last night after a couple of nights when it was looking a bit sickly.

The leisure battery powers things like the lights, water pump, water boiler and a few other things.

We woke this morning with no power at all, it had shut itself down overnight.

I was able to light the gas stove with a stick lighter so we didn`t miss the morning cuppa.

The power soon came back up as the sun rose in the morning sky and the solar panel began to stir into life generating electricity and charge the battery.

The difficulty maybe if it doesn`t holding the charge under load ?                          

Today we had planned to head for the coast at Ostende and have a few days by the seaside before our return crossing on Friday.

That changed with power problems, thoughts of bringing the crossing forward sprang to mind if we had no power and we`d need to get Louis his Vet check up done before we could travel.

So Louis Vet appointment was the priority.

Ringing around vets I was quoted 50 euro in Ghent, eek !!! that’s expensive.

I found one in Bruges that would do it for 20 euro, much more to my liking.

So, off to Bruges it was. The very friendly vet was easy to find and parking outside was plentiful.

So where to from here ? we decided to go back to the Aire in Bruges where I knew we could have electric hook up.

It`s where we started this journey 73 days ago, seven countries ago and 4,317 miles ago.

I even managed to park us on the same pitch, number 26 where we parked on that dark and rainy evening in April.

That day we could barely leave the motorhome for the rain coming down in stair rods.

So, it felt like we had come a full circle.

Except the weather is much better now.

We also bumped into Linda and Gordon that we had got talking to in Nordlingden in Germany so it was nice to catch up with them again.

They are on the Aire before catching their ferry tomorrow.

This afternoon we made the short walk through the park into the town and it was very very busy with tourists crowding the streets and filling the bars and restaurants to capacity.

It was quite a challenge just getting around with all the pedestrians, cyclists, horse and carts coming from every direction.

It is a very beautiful town though with some stunning buildings to photograph.

The chocolate shops though, well every other shop is an artisan chocolatier, there are far too many, there must be a lot of people eating the stuff to keep this lot open and in business.

Tomorrow, well I think we will head over to Ostende and then gradually make our way to Calais for Friday and hope we can get electric hook up along the way.

If we don`t we might find ourselves without power but what the heck, we`ll manage.                      

I won`t post many photos for now as I only have a limited amount of data and want to use it sparingly.

29th April 2018

9th July 2018