Belgium / Netherlands / Germany
- caravanhalen
- Aug 26
- 10 min read
Belgium
With the kids still buzzing from Harry Potter, and “wingardium leviosa”-ing each other all morning, we dropped the rental car off at Kings Cross. We’d given ourselves an extra hour for traffic, getting lost, and other such faff, and only needed 55 minutes of it. We spent our last pounds on sweets and checked in for the Eurostar to Brussels
It’s not cheap: slightly more than a cut-price airfare, but a ton easier and much quicker door to door. It’s not quite bullet train pace but not far off, and the chunnel bit is remarkably quick (which is merciful for any members of the travelling party not overly enamoured with the idea of a large dark tunnel under the sea)
After navigating some minor train connection snafus, which prompted the realisation that my schoolboy French is even worse than I thought it was, we were at our hotel in Brussels, and wandering for an evening stroll
There are many great town squares in Europe, but Grand Place is up there. It’s a fine way to start the European trip in earnest. I particularly loved the gold detailing on many of the buildings
The Mannekin Pis is another of Brussels’ best known sites. A block or two away from Grand Place, it’s a tiny street corner fountain of a little boy weeing. The mischevious little feller and his mischevious little feller is now a true icon of the city, and you can buy his likeness on every possible bit of tourist tat from the shops across the road. A few doors down, you can also buy some bloody tasty fries with mayo, and enjoy some of the world’s greatest beers. It would have been rude not to
The Mannekin Pis is but one of three weeing statues in the city. His colleagues, a girl and a dog, are yet to reach the same level of fame
We picked up our car for the rest of the trip in Brussels. French auto manufacturers can access some sort of tax break by renting new cars to non-EU nationals, who in return get a lovely new car at about half the price of a normal rental, and can pick it up at various major cities around Europe as long as it’s returned to France. Oui, s’il vous plait! We’ve got a Peugeot 5008, with a giant boot that’s just big enough for all our stuff. It’s lovely to drive
First stop was Louvain-la-nevre, a town just south of Brussels, home to the Musee Herge. I’ve loved Tintin since childhood, and have been thrilled that the kids are equally big fans. The museum isn’t flashy, but has loads of interesting background on Herge and his life, as well as exhibits on characters, places, and artefacts from the stories
We also ate at the museum café, where my bodgy French got the better of me again. My order of “moules frites” must have sounded to the waitress like “moi aussi” as I got the same thing Bo had just ordered (which was also delicious)
We based ourselves in Ghent for a few days – an underrated city in an underrated country. It feels very liveable, with a lovely old town and canals, but a slightly slower pace and less touristy. Graffiti alley was a hit with the kids ("Dad, can we borrow your Sharpie?")
It also has Frites Atelier, a restaurant that just serves fries cooked by a Michelin-starred chef. They live up to the billing, especially if you get them loaded with Flemish stew
We did a day trip to Bruges, and started off with waffles for morning tea on a little terrace overlooking a canal, which is a pretty good way to start
The best way to see Bruges is by boat, on its maze of narrow canals, with numerous low bridges. Even on a summer’s day, you get a sense of the moody broodiness of the ancient brick buildings
Bruges’ town square is lined with buildings displaying the distinctive crow-stepped gables that are characteristic of the town, and make for a classic tourist t-shirt design
There are a couple of breweries still operating in the city, and we stopped for lunch at Bourgogne des Flandres (with a tasting flight, naturally). The sour red ale was a stunner
Belgium has two official languages, French and Flemish, a dialect of Dutch. In Brussels, French seemed to be the dominant language, whereas in Ghent and Bruges it was mainly Flemish.
We didn’t see a lot of countryside in our driving around Belgium, and into the Netherlands. Cities seemed to sprawl into one another with lots of heavy industry, and every second vehicle on the motorways was a truck
One thing I did not know about Belgium is that it is riddled with mosquitoes. Poor old Kitty got absolutely devoured each night in Ghent. Ours seemed to be the common or garden variety, but apparently the unpleasant-sounding tiger mosquito is a growing issue
The kids are now at an age where they commandeer the in-car music most of the time. They both have a couple of playlists, and we listen to a small number of songs songs a great number of times, with the occasional parental intervention that meets with child approval. The soundtrack to date has mainly been: so, so much Taylor Swift; the Trolls and Wicked soundtracks (“Loathing! Un-a-dul-ter-a-ted loathing!”); ABBA; Parry Gripp; Weird Al Yankovic; bizarrely, “We Need to Talk About Dennis” by Panic Shack; Katy Perry; Sabbath/Ozzy; and Kitty’s fave “Call Me Maybe” about eight times every day
If beer had a world cup, the finalists would always be Belgium and Germany (beaten semi-finalists USA and UK; plucky NZ exiting in the quarters). I’m usually Team Germany, but a few days in Belgium definitely helps tip the scales their way a little. Every tap bank, and even more impressively, every fridge in every pokey corner shop is full of blondes, dubbels, tripels, and lambics from brewery hall-of-famers. It’s beer heaven
BEERWATCH: Pretty hard to go too wrong in Belgium, but my faves were the red ale from Bourgogne des Flandres, Waterloo red cherry lambic, and the Brouwerij Liefmans Ordnar dark sour from the pub across the road from the Mannekin Pis
Running gear remains in the suitcase. Maybe in Holland
Netherlands
From Belgium we headed northeast into the Netherlands for a few days in Amsterdam. Google Maps told us to get off the motorway and onto some backroads to avoid traffic, and the Dutch countryside was a lot more scenic than the industrial sprawl of the highway. We stopped at the first small town to get some lunch, and it was eerily deserted like an episode of the Twilight Zone. Turns out it was just that we’d arrived between 12-1, and everything and everyone had shut down for lunchbreak
We’d intended to stop off on the way to Amsterdam at Kinderdijk, a UNESCO heritage site showcasing numerous old windmills. Your humble narrator learnt an important lesson that one should plan ahead and not just assume you can turn up and get a carpark, or indeed that there ever were any carparks at all within a 5km radius. So we drove by some windmills from a distance instead
Amsterdam is a lot to take in. We started our first city day at the main train station, scenically located by the harbour. It was very hot, and it was a Saturday, and there were gazillions of people everywhere, and gazillions more riding bicycles at pace from all angles. There’s also a lot of rubbish everywhere, and a lot of different pungent smells (yes, the occasional cloud of pot, but mainly food, garbage, and humans). Pretty quicky it feels overwhelming, and takes a while to get used to
I liked it a lot more once we got out a few blocks out of the very centre and into the gorgeous canals of the Negen Straatjes (nine streets) area, although you still needed your wits about you to avoid getting maimed by a cheery cyclist
The kids loved visiting the Tony’s Chocolonely experience, and getting to design their own custom block of chocolate to pick up later in the day. Add a stroopwafel into the mix and that’s a pretty good snack day
Bo had read about a place called the Mouse Museum, a pokey two-storey shop featuring dozens of miniature buildings populated by toy mice going about their business. The kids were mesmerised by the level of detail and the high cuteness factor
We filled up the classic Amsterdam sights bingo card very quickly:
Smart cars
Cheese wheels
Novelty clogs
Tulip shops
Hen and stag parties
Loud Americans everywhere
After day one was a bit of an overwhelm, day two was a lot more chilled out. We went to the Van Gogh Museum in the morning, which is a relatively small but well put together collection with some great kids activities. There are a few missing classics in museums elsewhere (like “Starry Night” at MoMA), sold as tactical sacrifices by Vincent’s sister-in-law after both he and his brother’s deaths, to fund keeping the rest of the collection together
After that we when-in-Romed it, and rented bikes for the afternoon for a ride around Vondelpark, the massive green space in the centre of the city. Vondelpark is a great spot to exercise or chill out on the grass, and on a sunny weekend it was rammed with thousands of young folk doing just that, a surprisingly small amount of whom were engulfed by a cloud of smoke. The kids hadn’t been on bikes for a few weeks, but Kitty in particular was soon zooming round like a mad thing
The UK drives on the left like NZ, but all of Europe drives on the right. Having driven around North America a fair bit, it stops feeling unnatural pretty quickly. The one part I do find hard is parking – you don’t have an intuitive feel for the angles and dimensions of the car. The various sensors and cameras in a modern car are helpful, although with a fairly big car and a lot of very small and tight roads and parking spaces, there’s still some comedy gold for passersby
Running gear remains in the suitcase. Maybe in Germany
Germany
Next stop was a couple of days in Germany, on a bit of a family history mission. Bo’s family on her Dad’s side have roots in Germany, in Hildesheim and Hannover, and armed with some old photos and postcards we went on the hunt
Hildesheim doesn’t have a lot to recommend it other than a fine town square. Most of the buildings were destroyed in WW2 and have been reconstructed, including one that bears the name of a great-great-great-great-uncle
There’s also family history in Hannover. As well as a street named after a distant relation, there’s another town square to explore. An old photo shows a distinctive fountain, with a house behind it that the great-great-great-great-uncle lived in. A postcard found via some google sleuthing shows a slightly different angle of the fountain, and the town hall next to it. Hannover was also heavily bombed, and the house was flattened, this time replaced by an ugly hotel complex. But it’s fun to find the town hall and fountain, and replicate the old photo
All that primary historical research works up an appetite, and we found the Waterloo Biergarten, an absolutely cracking spot at the corner of a park, with dozens of long outdoor tables under shady trees, surrounded by kiosks selling food and bier. On a weekday most were closed, but enough to get schnitzel, currywurst, and fries, and big glasses of hefeweizen and one of my fave obscure German styles, altbier. About as good a lunch as one could ever hope for
At the Waterloo Biergarten I had a strange chat with an old dude having a beer by himself. My German and his English were equally ropey, but the general gist seemed to be that he was in the band Iron Butterfly. This seemed plausible, until a Google later on revealed that all the band members were a) American, and b) dead. Still, it was a good chance to play “Inna Gadda Da Vida” to the kids in the car later on
Next was a short visit to Hamburg, where I wished we’d had more time – it seems like a bloody great town. After a quick wander past the impressive Rathaus (town hall) and the venetian-style arcades by the inland lake, we spent some time in the Speicherstadt, the warehouse district. Hamburg is located on the river Elbe, and is Germany’s largest seaport. The warehouse district, now a UNESCO world heritage site, is a collection of neo-gothic and modernist brick buildings built on the canals. They’re still used as warehouses, although some now house museums and trendy offices
Hamburg is home to one of Europe’s cult football teams, St Pauli, based in the city’s most colourful area, next to the infamous Reeperbahn red light district, a giant funfair, and this amazing building, a former WW2 anti-aircraft bunker turned into a hotel and hospo precinct
St Pauli have boinged between the Bundesliga and the second division recently, but being good is generally immaterial when it comes to cult fandom. They’re best known as a bastion of militantly left wing politics and diversity, deliberately opposed to the ultras from some other teams who sadly have links to neo-Nazis. Their skull and crossbones logo and rainbow flags are iconic in German football, and the matchday experience is renowned as a raucous good time – sadly, we weren’t there for a game
One obvious difference to the US trip is language. I hate the idea of being the stereotype anglo tourist who doesn’t even try to speak the local lingo and assumes everyone will speak English. But on the other hand, we are going through 12 European countries with not much more than high school French (me), and German (Bo) and 100+ day Duolingo streak French (Mo)
The first few countries were the gentlest introduction possible – even Dutch and Flemish have something in common with German, so we could sometimes make sense of street signs and menus. Many touristy places have an English translation, and a lot of Europeans speak very good English. The general course of most interactions is: us trying to start off in French/Dutch/German; then, either a) the local person wincing slightly as we butcher their beautiful language, and replying in English to cut their losses; or b) the local person replying in their language using words outside the School C syllabus, us looking blankly, and them switching to English
Running gear remains in the suitcase. Maybe in Denmark
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