We spent this morning at the Van Gogh Museum. It's lovely and is organised by the stages of his life. He only was an artist for the last 10 years of his life, but he was so prolific. In my next life I'd like to be an artistic genius, but as most of them wind up committing suicide, maybe not. Peter and I split up in the afternoon - he went off to the Maritime Museum and I wandered the shopping area Nine Little Streets and more of the Jordaan neighbourhood. I didn...

I'm exhausted tonight, having tried to cover so much of this beautiful city over the first two days of our stay here. Yesterday after we arrived from Maastricht about 2:00 pm, we strolled through the Jordann (yor-DAHN) neighbourhood where we're staying, and hooked up with my neice Kimberly who we overlapped with here for one day. Later we took a boat tour with the owner of the accommodation business we booked our room with. Frederic has just a small boat that w...

My son's been raving about how beautiful Maastricht is for years, and now that we've caught up with him here, I have to agree - it's such a lovely small city. We've had a fantastic couple of days catching up with Bennett and Lara, as well as my niece Kimberly who extended a work trip to the UK to join us for the weekend. The city has been so fun to explore - the old walled city is packed with interesting shops, restaurants and bars. The river sets a beautiful ba...

After a good night's sleep and jet-lag behind us, we set off for a "tick the tourist boxes" day in Brussels. For starters, we had coffee and waffles on the Grand Place. See my photos for the low-cal banana and chocolate number I ordered. We then took a 3-hour walking tour, which was great in that we hit the high-spots across a few neighbourhoods, and got a fair bit of Belgian history and cultural education thrown in. And yes, I had take away pommes frites with ...

At long last we've made it back to Europe. Last time here I was 16, so it's been a year or two. The trip was fairly uneventful, which was a good thing considering we were on a US-based carrier, which I find have lower standards than airlines from other countries. (OK, I'm mostly annoyed that United doesn't serve free beer and wine on international flights. - miss you Qantas!) We took the train into Central Brussels, and armed with a very, hard-to-read map, we st...