The Land of Chocolate, Beer, Mussels, Fries and Waffles

It was inevitable.

After clocking so many kilometers in so many foreign countries, it was becoming statistically impossible for me to not get completely, utterly lost at some point.  And this sort of thing always happens when you let your guard down, when you feel you’re on semi-familiar turf.  Overconfidence is deadly.

I of course have a knack for picking the worst possible date to do things.  The date I chose to take off for Belgium happened to coincide with the Saturday after the last day of school in France.  The traffic was rated “red.”  Gaël and I discussed the pros and cons of taking the more direct route to Belgium through Paris, or circumventing Paris and her famous “bouchons” –plug-like traffic jams—and adding some extra time to our trip.  I left the decision up to him, and he wisely chose to go the roundabout route, through Rouen.  We seemed to be headed the right direction, no cars on our side, and facing backups of many miles on the side headed towards the beaches.  Traffic picked up a bit as we entered Belgium, headed towards Brussels; I became mildly frustrated at the Belgian tendency to let trees and branches grow profusely over roadside signs, but felt pretty comfortable that I knew which direction to take to get to Leuven/Kessel-Lo.

I had left Gertrude the GPS with my in-laws, who were taking their own camping trip in Alsace this week, and was relying on Google maps and directions, and my phone’s GPS.  Just a word of advice to you all, repeat this to yourself as often as is needed:

Your smart phone will only be as helpful as its battery life.

As we navigated from Ring to E40 to E314 to N2 to Nsomethingelse, Gaël started announcing the quickly depleting battery percentage.  I wasn’t worried.  After all, I’d visited my friend Amy in Leuven several times, had done a little 4K race in the center, had done the walk from the train station.  No sweat.  But then I found myself in construction, and sensed that I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere.  As I tried to find a place to turn around among bicycle paths with their own traffic lights and weird parking places, Gaël announced that the phone was dead.  I looked around and realized that nothing looked familiar.  Oh well, I thought, I could just drive into Leuven and things would start looking familiar, and I’d find the train station, and we’d just slide our way into Kessel-Lo and find the right street.

Not so.

To make a long, sweaty, frustrating, cussword-filled (Gaël learned some new ones, and I’m pretty sure I owe him about $85 for the infractions) story short, we wandered the streets of Leuven for what seemed like forever, often going down one-ways (I wasn’t always sure I was going the right direction), and getting honked at for most likely breaking 22 driving laws at once.  We stopped to ask directions four times; first, from an older gentleman who didn’t really speak English, second from a group of four very nicely-dressed folks on their way to a celebration of some sort, third from a very nice lady, and fourth from a very helpful, handsome young man in a gas station.  Now, Kessel-Lo is the Savoy to Leuven’s Champaign-Urbana, but when I asked all these people for directions, they mostly shook their heads in despair and said, “but this is Leuven, not Kessel-Lo.”  Well, duh, I wanted to answer, but it’s not like 20 miles away, right?  I mean, it’s just the next bit past the train tracks, right?  You would think we were trying to go to….Wallonia, for god’s sakes!?!

The young man at the gas station finally got us back to the part of the Google map instructions that didn’t have construction interruptions, and thankfully my son recognized the house—I was so flustered I drove right past.  When I finally turned in to the driveway, my friend Amy burst from the house, obviously worried that the worst had happened.  She cheered us up immediately with her warm welcome, her happy family, and some cold beverages.  We’d made really good time on our trip to Belgium, except for the hour and a half we’d spent wandering around Leuven.  At one point, after I’d approached and asked the third person for directions, the bashful Gaël proclaimed, “Mom, I could never do what you do, go up to strangers like that!”

To which I responded, “yes, but what choice did we have?  We had no phone to reach Amy, didn’t even have her telephone number on a piece of paper so that someone else could call her for us.  I don’t like approaching strangers either, but it was desperation!”

The stay so far in Kessel-Lo has by far made up for its rocky beginnings.  Saturday evening we relaxed and recovered from our adventure.  On Sunday Amy’s good friend Aisling took the train from Brussels to come for lunch.  Aisling is Irish, but has lived for many years in Brussels; we have spent more than one holiday here with Aisling and her family, so I was really looking forward to her visit.  We ate lunch on the lovely patio and then retreated to the indoors when the sun got too hot; we spent most of the afternoon watching the Wimbledon men’s final, making the teenage boys uncomfortable with our “middle-age women’s” jokes, and eating loads of delicious desserts.  I haven’t giggled so much in a long time.  Aisling stayed until 9 when she rushed off to catch her train back to Brussels.

Amy, Stefaan, and Aisling in Amy and Stefaan's garden

Monday we prepared a picnic lunch to take to Zoet Water (“Sweet Water”), a park where you can fill up your bottles at the source, a high-iron-content spring.  After filling up, we continued along the woods path past a church, then to the Speelbos (“Play Woods”), a collection of stations with games and activities for climbing, etc.  The hike in the woods was perfect for a hot, sunny day, and Amy and I got in a lot of chat time while the three boys (two of hers and one of mine) worked off some of their boy-energy.

Tuesday Amy’s husband Stefaan had the day off of work, and he drove the five of us (one of the boys had a pool party) to the American cemetery Henri-Chapelle, close to Liège.  I’ve wanted to visit the cemetery there for many years, as my uncle Delno is buried there.  My mother’s older brother died at the age of 26 in WWII while working as a radio technical specialist; he was in Aachen, Germany two days after the front had moved in, and his compound was destroyed by accident by a British plane who dumped its payload too early.  My mother and my aunt visited his grave in 1958 on their round-the-world tour coming home from Japan, the same year the World’s Fair was in Brussels.

It’s always sobering to visit these enormous American cemeteries in Europe.  As Stefaan said, “as you stand there, instead of grave markers, picture lines of 18-year-old boys, barely men, standing there.”  And realize they gave their lives for freedom.  We forget too quickly.  Fortunately, it was a moving experience for Gaël to visit the grave of his great-uncle; when leaving, he exclaimed, “I’ll never forget those people and what they did.”  Let’s hope he doesn’t.

Next we went to the Dreilandenpunt, the “Three countries point” where Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany meet.  We had lunch in the Netherlands, walked a fairly complicated labyrinth in Belgium, and walked a small path in the woods in Germany. 

Driving back we went through some pretty areas in the Ardennes region of Belgium, and some towns and areas on the dividing line between Wallonia and Flanders.  

It is indeed a wonderful place that would have a gelato farm....we wished we'd had time to find out if it was free-range gelato, and how it was cultivated....

The Ardennes--view from Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery

Stefaan explained some of the fierce political strife in these seemingly sleepy little towns, all over linguistic differences, which ultimately translate into economic and political power struggles.  Aisling had reasoned on Sunday that the Belgians could most likely solve most of their struggles in one generation by introducing bilingual education in Flemish and French in all Belgian schools; once every person started speaking both languages fluently, there would be no room for such divisiveness.  Unfortunately, such initiatives at present can only be a dream….

Signs of protest--a Flemish village proclaiming itself to be Walloon, or French-speaking

Today we are planning a relaxing day, a nice lunch, some laundry, and bowling this afternoon.  Although mussels are currently not in season, we will try to find a restaurant for dinner serving the classic moules-frites that Gaël has been begging for.  Belgium may not be the culinary center of the universe, but it certainly has so many of my favorites:  chocolate, beer, mussels, fries with mayonnaise, and waffles.  And we only have a couple more days to fit them all in…..