During February and March, Willow and I have been flexing our DIY muscles and done some major flat renovations. It was a very intense period and mentally challenging. I think that the fact that we came out at the end of the tunnel with our mental health still intact is great achievement in itself.

So as a well deserved break from all the flat-renovation-madness, Willow and I decided to use the easter weekend and the following bank holiday to get away from the Do-It-Yourself battlefield of Flat 7 and go to Belgium.

London to Brussels with the Eurostar takes only 1hr 51 minutes from Kings Cross station. That’s about the same amount of time you need to be in advance at the airport if you’re flying somewhere. Yeah — trains rule, planes suck.

We decided to take our bikes with us. We have talked about doing a bike holiday for quite some time and thought that bringing them along would be a good initial test. The Eurostar website makes it sound so easy; cheap and accessible, but, unfortunately for us, it turned out being expensive and complicated.

When we arrived at the station on Thursday morning we found out that the Eurostar Dispatch doesn’t open until 6 a.m while we needed to board at 5:30am. This resulted to us taking a later train. A simular thing happened on our return; when we arrived back in London at 10:04pm on Tuesday and the Eurostar Dispatch had already closed at 10pm. So we had to revisit Kings Cross on Wednesday to collect our bikes. On top of this, if you have two bikes and want to send them return to Brussels, it will set you back around £80.

We stayed in Brussels at the lovely August’ INN, a bed and breakfast run by architect Geoffroy Lemaigre and his wife Sophie van der Dussen. It was really nice. This underlines that Willow does have an amazing gift on finding nice places to stay when on holiday, and that the Bed & Coffee we stayed at in New York was not a fluke.

Besides Brussels, Willow and I took the train to Antwerpen, Brugge, Gent and Amsterdam. Yeah, again — trains rule (except for the bike thing of course).

So, to summarise and wrap up this totally uninteresting post — I liked Belgium and was very impressed by Amsterdam. I’m now even more fond of Belgium beer and an Easter weekend in Belgium gets very chocolat’y.

Some photos can be found on willow’s flicker