A Long Day

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Sunday was a long day. We packed up our stuff, said goodbye to our hosts and then headed out of town. On our way out, we checked out a small British cemetery and then we headed on to Brugge.

At this point we were done with our tour of James' battle sites, and we were going to briefly check out the four areas where I had served on my mission.

Kortrijk, which we had seen the day before, was my third area. While I had never served in Brugge, we had to stop here because it is probably the most beautiful city in Europe, and it was on our way. Brugge claims to be the Venice of Europe because of all their canals. That is a funny claim because isn’t Venice also in Europe? This picture was taken in the Marketplace and truly is a beautiful city.

Of course, if this is “The Venice of Europe” we had to take a boat tour of the many canals. They were impressive.

How would you like a house where your doorstep opens onto a canal? I think that would be pretty cool.

Our tour guide on the boat ride pointed out to us how many of the houses had a tiny little hole near the peak of the roof. You can see one in the top right-hand picture. That is for pigeons. Keeping pigeons is very common in Belgium and they came in handy during the war to communicate with each other.

I look like I’m in the middle of a seizure or something in this picture, but I included it to emphasize once again how Europe was not made for people like me.

There are so many beautiful churches that I quit taking pictures after a while, but I thought this one was brighter and prettier than most so here is a picture of another chapel.

After the boat tour we made our way back to our car and headed all the way across the country to Arendonk. When I served in Turnhout my area included Arendonk which is maybe five miles outside Turnhout. I rode my bike to this area pretty much every single day of the five months I served there. I always claimed that by the time I left Turnhout, I could have ridden my bike all the way home. That is assuming that I could ride on water, I guess.

Every day in Arendonk, I would ride past this beautiful windmill. I am fascinated with windmills, but this one was old, and shutdown and they were not offering tours. When Lisa was gathering information on all the places, we planned to see, she learned that this windmill had been renovated and is now functional and is also offering tours. I had to go.

As we were driving to Arendonk, we passed many modern windmills and I couldn’t help but think how Belgium is still a land of windmills, they are just very different windmills.

The grandfather, who used to operate the windmill, built a working model of the windmill which showed every detail. It was amazing but since I was inside the real deal I was much more interested in the real deal.

This is one of the two mill stones.

In the basement they have an oil press.

The mash from the oil press is then pressed. The mill lifts a heavy post and drops it between two wedges.

This is the second of the two mill stones.

Some of the gears that drive everything.

We then drove into Turnhout and checked out my old apartment. We lived in the apartment on the top floor on the left. It has been greatly modernized since I lived here almost fifty years ago. Turnhout was my first area. I learned to speak Dutch in this town but no thanks to my trainer who was a bit of a jerk. In the entire time we served together, he never spoke Dutch to me once.

I loved the name of our street, I lived on Kwakkelstraat. What a cool name.

We then checked out Turnhout’s pathetic excuse for a castle. I believe it was being used as city hall when I lived here.

After driving around the downtown area for a bit, we then headed into Antwerpen and found Marleen. She currently lives in the exact same apartment where she lived as a sixteen-year-old girl where we found her. When her parents died, she bought the apartment where they lived. It was a long day, but we visited until well into the night anyway.