It was a very early start, with us getting up at 5am after a long week and piling our stuff into the boot (it's not big, but we were only away one night!) before heading quickly down to Folkestone to get to the Eurotunnel (le Shuttle). In quite quaint news, the terminal going into France is called the Victor Hugo terminal, and the one coming back into England is the Charles Dickens terminal! Very sweet. We arrived just in time to straight away join the queue to get on our train, which was quite the interesting experience. After a lot of queuing, you simply drive on to the train! As we have a small car, we were in the double decker section, on the ground floor on the way over. You literally park the car and stop it on the train, with the windows down, and chill in your car until you have arrived in France!
Once the train has arrived, you drive off the train, on to a sliproad and then you're on the motorway! To drive in Europe you have to have a few extra things: a GB sticker or numberplate (we installed ours on the Friday night before we left), high vis vests, a safety triangle, a pair of breathalyser tubes (you have to have one legally, but if they test you and then you have none left you're instantly illegal, so you carry two), and if you have an older car, you have to have headlight adjusters so that you can tilt your headlights to being on the other side of the road. Because our car is brand new (like, actually), it simply has an option in the settings to change the road settings to 'Europe', and the displays to metric. So we were off!
First we headed to Dunkerque (Dunkirk), to have a look at the famous beach. Unfortunately, the museum was closed for the winter (although just about to reopen for the Christmas period) so we couldn't go there, and the weather was pretty miserable, so we wandered around for a bit and read some information before deciding to head back into the car and on to the next destination.
We drove along the coast towards Ghent, stopping next in Oostende. Unfortunately along the coast road it was mostly closed, so the route was not as scenic as we had hoped. They had cool sculptures along the beach, and we had delicious ham and cheese baguettes in the French style. We did briefly check out the beach, however this backfired once we got exposed into the driving wind. Sand getting in our eyes and into my tights and I bailed on that part of the beach pretty fast! Then we were back on the road, next stop being Ghent.
On arriving in Ghent, we drove straight to the hotel, checked in and got into our room. We stayed in the Marriott near the city centre as it was conveniently located and had a carpark! After freshening up, we decided to head for a walk into the city centre and find the Christmas markets. Lucky for us, they were super easy to find! The map we were given by the hotel was actually more spread out in real life, with the market being in 3 main parts but actually being only about 10 minutes from one end to the other without stopping. We started with drinks - Richard having beer (duh) and I tried a fantastic jenever (gin) which was waffle flavoured! I ended having a few over the course of the evening. We ended up walking the whole length without buying anything, before deciding it was dinner time. We wanted to sit down, so we went looking for a restaurant to eat at. It did turn out, however, that without a booking we couldn't get in anywhere!
So we went back to the market and had food from there for dinner. Frites, a bradwurst, hot chocolate... Plus we bought a few things - marzipan, coconut biscuits, chocolate truffles. It was a delightful evening, but we were quite cold by the end, and ended up back in the hotel reasonably early, curled up with a cup of tea to watch a little TV before bed.
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