A Belgian Adventure

Late Saturday afternoon we left Bruges to head for the coast, just 15 km away.  The nearest city on the beach is Oostende, so we drove towards there and decided to head west once we hit the coast to look for a campground.  When we had decided originally to camp on the beach, I imagined something akin to this picture:

"Beach camping" as pictured on the National Park Services website.

Wrong. Boyfriend wasn't surprised at all when we pulled into this camp ground:

Albatros Camping, just outside of Middelkerke, Belgium.

What?! That's not a campground, it's a mega city! I guess campsites in Belgium look a little different than our national park campgrounds in America. The picture above is actually of a postcard of the camping megacity which they gave us when we checked-in. It had the gate code on it so we could get our car inside the very secure megacity.  Welcome to Belgium beach camping!  I think this quote from a Flanders toursim website describes it well, "A real family residential campsite park where both young and old feel at home."

Boyfriend said there might have been a smaller campground had we kept driving further down the beach, but we were tired, the dark clouds were rolling in, and I kinda wanted to experience the real camping megacity.

We then pitched our tent and headed back into the nearest town, Middelkerke, to find food for dinner. Luckily, we just caught a few stores still open and found the essentials for sandwiches. Then we bundled up for a quick walk on the beach! It was super windy, the sky was overcast and the water was freezing, but I had to say I'd put my feet in the North Sea.

Sandwiches back at the campsite, a few rounds of uno and then we called it a night. Before I knew it, I was waking up to the sound of a loudspeaker yelling in Dutch and French.  Not the setting I would have chosen for an alarm clock, but for 25 Euro, what do you expect?

Slowly we packed up the tent and drove back into Middelkerke to return to a place we had spotted the night before: a mini golf course! As I've mentioned before, we love mini golf, and for me, no trip to the beach is complete without it!

Boyfriend playing mini golf in Middelkerke.

Not too happy being stuck between those hills!

21 holes later (I know, I thought that was strange too) the sun was almost about to shine through the clouds, so we decided to drive down the coast and find a nice beach.  I wasn't too hopeful since I hadn't seen much blue sky over the past couple weeks in Europe, but I was willing to cross fingers and at least take a nice walk.

To the beach!

To my surprise, it turned out to be a gorgeous day! We parked the car and climbed the huge sand dunes to the beach access and walked along with our feet sinking into the sand.  The wind made it too chilly to run around in bathing suits still, and the water was just plain cold, so we went back into the dunes to find a spot sheltered from the wind.  The beaches I normally visit in Florida don't have such dunes, but I really liked that people would just hangout there.

Napping in the dunes.

After a relaxing afternoon in the dunes, and a nice long nap in the sun we both were sun-kissed and sandy, and ready to head home.  Even though it was only one night away, it really felt like a vacation, and we had so much fun.  We did make one more stop though, since we were in a spontaneous mood. I spotted a highway sign that said, "Spy" on it and mentioned, "Hey, I think Bill Bryson talked about going to that town in his book."

Boyfriend said, "Want to go?"

"Yes!"

The problem was, I didn't remember what he said about the town of Spy. We drove around the ordinary town for five minutes and I wondered if Bryson thought it was a dud too. Maybe that's all he said about it? Don't go! I thought. But just as we were about to give up, we spotted a brown tourist sign with an arrow that said, "Grotte de Spy." Hmmm... intriguing. Let's go!

The road towards "Grotte de Spy"

We drove down a long road until finally we reached a parking lot where a few other cars were parked, and there was a large graffiti-ed sign and an arrow pointing down a path that said "1 km."  I was wearing a bathing suit, a coverup and flip flops; hardly an outfit for hiking, but who am I to pass up an adventure? So we started walking.

Eventually we were lead to a steep winding trail that ended at the entrance to a big cave. We walked around inside and even found a very narrow part that lead deeper into the cave. The sign posted was in French, so we didn't exactly know what we were looking at besides a big cave.  Wikipedia has since informed me that Grotte de Spy was where scientists made some major discoveries about Neaderthals.

Inside the narrow section of the Grotte de Spy

Turns out, Bryson didn't visit Spy. He went to Spa. Think I would have preferred the latter.

But I love the idea that just because we thought there was something to see there, we went on search of an adventure. And we found one.