Antwerp

I was anxious to get a good swim workout in this morning and so we walked about a half mile the local pool.  Of course, today they are closed in the morning for some reason.  Who knows why.  So scratch that idea.  We get our stuff together and head out by train to Antwerp, a city none of us have ever been to.  The train ride is short -- 50 minutes.  Trains run almost every 10-15 minutes which was nice.  And no, we didn't need a reservation for these trains!

The train station in Antwerp is stunning.  It a 4 or 5 level station with trains leaving on each level.  It's gorgeous.

Antwerp Train Station

Other than our afternoon plans (more on that to come), we had no real agenda for the day.  We set out to explore the city, which is not really anything to write home about.  But they had more chocolate and waffle shops than we had seen in previous cities.  We had already been stymied multiple times by sub-par waffles but we were not going to give in.  So we tried another one in town and it was better but still not what we expected!  The search continues..

The main square and church are fairly nice and that's what you see below in the pictures.  But that's just about it.  Of course, it's still nice walking around any European city for us..

Antwerp

Antwerp

Antwerp

Antwerp

Antwerp

We had a really good lunch with some traditional Flemish dishes -- beef carbonnade and pork stoemp.  The stoemp is a mashed vegetable (with potatoes) dish  and in this case with pork sausage and thick bacon.  This place used a bit of spinach today.  (so it's basically mashed potatoes with spinach in them)  Very tasty.  Karen and I also had to get a Belgian beer before we left the country.  It was pretty good -- and was as cheap as Josh's water!

Rare Shot:  Shabels drinking beer

We did even more walking after lunch (it ended up being 8.5 miles total today) before we got to our afternoon reservation at Antwerp Clue.  It's a game/mystery place where they stick you in a room with a lot of clues and you have an hour to escape.  We hadn't heard much about these kinds of places but I guess they are now very popular and there are even some in San Diego.  We got in the kids room.  It's a kids play room but all of the kids have disappeared and we need to figure out who took them.  In this room, there are a lot of kids toys and boxes with padlocks.. and we need to figure out the combinations to open them all.  It was really neat.  Josh had high expectations for it (he'd been waiting for it since we booked it last week) and it lived up it!  We all had to work as a team to find clues and get out.  We finished the game with 5 seconds to go.  They gave us several clues along the way if we were stumped.  I think that was the highlight of our day -- for all of us.

Antwerp Clue afterwards

We walked back to the train station and we tried yet another waffle stand -- this time in the train station.  And sure enough, this one was great!

Train Station Waffles -- the best so far!

We then headed back to Brussels.  Then had a good dinner -- Josh had meatballs (they like their meat here!) and we had another version of Stoemp, this time with beets.  Still excllent.

Tonight we will get to bed at a normal time unlike last night when we got back so late.  Tomorrow, we will take the fast train to Amsterdam.  And yes, this time we have reservations!

I'll leave you with the usual portrait in front of Brussels' little squirt.