I didn't even
Know where Bruges was. It's in Bel-
Gium. Oh, the movies.
Today's ride was a little sad; packing up to leave Bart's apartment was made more unpleasant by the thought that we don't have another host planned for several, several days (none until Ken in the UK, if I recall correctly... sigh.), but we're pretty used to the tent now. Since it and the sleeping bags had a chance to air out over the last couple days, they smell much pleasanter.
Equipped with proper maps and some advice from Niels about bicycling in Belgium, we were actually quite comfortably set to make it to Brugge today via Gent. It was around 100km, and I don't think we got lost even once. It was sort of... boring. We discussed that we need to find a better balance between getting lost and getting bored. Following minor highways that go direct presents a nicely-paved and straightforward way of getting from place to place, but "ribbon building" (as Niels called it) means lots of similar-looking buildings crowd along these routes, even when one is outside of cities.
Gent was unremarkable. We had lunch on a bridge in the old town and enjoyed a view of their fort. It was an important turning-point in bike roads, though, as on the east side of it they seemed limited to gravelly shoulders on the side of the main road, and on the west side we got to go along routes that paralleled train lines and passed through fields and the like. We even passed through a town whose name I don't recall that had bicycles and tricycles along the median in the centre of town, each one painted a lively green and with a handlebar basket functioning as a planter.
Our own Evan Stratford took a rather remarkable fall off his bicycle around Gent. Hooking his handlebars through the lock dangling from my top pannier, he threw himself headfirst into the ground, then turned that throw into an impressively-styled roll directly into a sewage drainage ditch. His scent was unparalelled for the rest of the day, and he now has a wicked-looking scratch on his knee to commemorate the incident.
Brugge, though, is great. As Europe's best-preserved medieval city, it is naturally a huge tourist spot. It's got some old windmills, but it's just packed with fantastic old structures. There aren't yards in Brugge; all the space is filled by intricate buildings. The absurd picturesqueness of the city actually began to annoy us after a while. Oh, look, another perfect cathedral. Guess I have to take a $#(@& photo.
We took a pause to enjoy Belgium's contribution to world cuisine: the fry. The shop we found offered a variety of delicious sauces, and the one we selected was gravy with whole peppercorns. Mmmmmm...
Our curiosity about the city (and our rumbling tummies) satisfied, we headed back to our campground, where we sat up in the tent and watched a film called "In Bruges" (from which the haiku at the beginning of this post is taken). It's quite a film. We found it amusing that the main character had the same sort of "I am annoyed by how pretty all this is" attitude that we found ourselves with.