Day 10: Bruges to Kortrijk

September 5, 2023

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Our way out of Bruges would take us again through the main square. But we paused for a few seconds to get our bearings. During that time I was just glancing at some various nearby not so fancy buildings. They looked like this:

But with the extra time to just look, I realized that these buildings were not totally simple, and were fancy in their own way. Just look closely at the brick work - how there are different colours and patches. But also look at the zig zag angles of the bricks. Can you imagine being the bricklayer on this project? How do you build the bricks up in such a way? Wow!

We did get our bearings, and arrived back in the square. The horses and carriages had assembled for their day of tourist rides. I was concerned that some were stamping their feet, but I accepted Dodie's explanation that they were eager to get going, and not crabby.

Dodie wants to be sure that everybody can see not only the horses but also the carriages. So here is a complete horse and carriage:

Bruges is a city of canals, which allow not only boat tours but great scenic shots, like those below.

Me and another photographer/cyclist swerved to cut off a car, to get to this photo viewpoint. I pointed out to him, as he framed his shot, that you could not go wrong with this one. That was certainly correct.

The red window frames reflected in the water!

We left the really old core, but the town continued for a bit, and is still very attractive.

Finally we really were out of town. We followed a canal for a bit, but ultimately landed on a kind of standard highway. As always, the bike way was clearly defined, and we felt very safe cycling this.

The highway did not offer anything of much interest to look at. In fact businesses that were along the way all seemed to be closed. They were in any event not very interesting - like construction companies, or pool supplies, hairdressers, or car dealers. At some points there were some interesting farm things - like a lot of alpaca farms, Belgian Blue cattle, corn, even Brussels Sprouts. I didn't shoot any of these, but I was intrigued by the colour of this field of leeks:

Another feature of the places we were passing was an interest in accurately trimming shrubs. We passed some really exceptional examples before I realized that this was a "thing", and recorded at least this one place:

After a while, despite the nice bike lane, we grew tired of all the noise from the road. We took a bit of a side route, but soon landed back on the highway. A lot of the noise came from big tractors hauling loads. We passed some tractor dealers along the way, and each and every tractor in the lots was the size of the one seen in the photo.

We made our way into Kortrijk and found our way easily to the central square. The only thing, we had to look kind of hard for quaint scenes to photograph. We guessed the reason, and later with Google confirmed that war damage was at fault. On July 21, 1944 300 Avro Lancasters dropped over 5000 bombs on the city centre, destroying many old buildings plus the railway station which was used by the Germans as a transport hub.

We did see the Broel Towers, which are along the river Lys.

And in the central square, there are two towers, the big one from Saint Martins church.

The Saint Martin's tower (Sint Maartens Toren)

We are not so keen on BnB type places, with key codes and nobody around to help figure out where to put the bikes. But in fact, we do often end up happy, with larger rooms and maybe a refrigerator or stove. In Kortwijk our place is called the "Focus Hotel". It is kind of a hybrid, with no reception staff, but a buffet breakfast on offer in the morning. The curve that we did get thrown was bike parking offered two blocks away, in someone's garage, also with a key code. We puzzled quite a while with the GPS to locate this parking, and I was for carrying the bikes up the narrow steps to our room instead. But it did work out in the end, and we are happy now in our cool room. The cool room is a big plus, since it hit at least 35 degrees outside today. The cappucino machine in the breakfast room is free to use any time as well, so I would have to conclude that life is good!

Today's ride: 53 km (33 miles)
Total: 388 km (241 miles)

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Tricia GrahamAm glad you had a good experience with the Focus Hotel. Years ago ours was anything but good. They refused to accept we had a booking even though I had confirmation and other general unpleasantness. The result Booking came to the rescue and found us somewhere really excellent elsewhere
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