Our journey today was one of the most straightforward we have done In a long time. We are eating up the miles in order to get close to Zeebrugge for our ferry home on Friday.
We are staying in Nancy, a place that we have passed signs for on countless journeys up, down and across France.
Our hotel is in one of the oldest properties in the town and parts date back to the 15th Century; our room is accessed by an external spiral stone staircase complete with balconies.
After setting our computer and Sat Nav to download maps for Central Europe, as we discovered on arrival in Belgium at the beginning of the holiday and again this morning that we don't have maps for either Belgium or France, we went to the local supermarket to get some sandwiches for lunch and made our way into a nearby park. We were just finishing eating when we could vaguely hear an announcement about 'circumstances exceptional' but couldn't hear much more; we carried on sitting when a policeman came along and started to shout and gesticulate at us, we finally understood that he was saying the park was closed due to 'natural conditions', everyone else began to leave and the policeman was stopping people entering- most looked surprised.
We carried on walking and exploring the Unesco protected squares which were stunning. We are quite used to finding monuments, museums and other places of interest closed, covered in scaffolding or boarded up when we visit places but it is the first time that we have been hoiked out of somewhere! We tried to visit another smaller park later on, but only to find the same closure message.
Nancy had many wonderful old buildings within its historic quarter; well with a stop over of passing this way.