Last weekend was too nice to stay inside and breathe brick dust. We took a couple days off of the reno project and on Sunday drove up the Bruce to see the water and visit Keppel Croft, a rural garden with folksy art and an analemma. We picnicked at a park by the bay before heading home to water the plants :)
(DAY 7)
We were back in Brussels for our last night in Belgium by late afternoon. After a bit of wandering semi-lost in the matrix of streets around the Bourse, we found our (delightful) hotel: Hotel Cafe Pacific.
By the time we got to the hotel we had purchased lace, chocolate, and beer. We rested up for an evening of more wandering and some bar-hopping by sipping two abbey beers from the “250 beers” store: a Westvleteren 6 and a Westvleteren 8. (Smuggling an empty beer bottle back to Canada did cause some minor issues with the scanner people at the airport the next day, but I’m glad we kept the souvenir).
When we ventured back out into the city, we stopped at one cafe specifically to try Kwak, then we window-shopped our way over to another place for crepes. Finally, the last beer hunt was on for Delirium Tremens. We walked all over little cobblestoned streets and side-streets, past hundreds of miniature Manneken Pises until we found the unmissable pink elephant label.
Though the sign outside said “Delirium Cafe”, the beer menu said “Hoppy Loft”. It didn’t matter where we were, though, because the beer list was the longest we’d ever seen.
Side note: the actual meaning of “delirium tremens”, according to PubMed, quite aptly describes Eric’s feeling about leaving Belgium:
Delirium tremens is a severe form of alcohol withdrawal that involves sudden and severe mental or nervous system changes.
All these photos are from the Delirium Cafe:
During our 6-day trip to North Carolina immediately before the presidential election, I was anticipating seeing lots of crazy yard signs. Nope. It was mainly your standard DNC / RNC issue signs mixed with local billboards, but drowned out by the thousands of signs for all the lesser positions which clutter up the US ballots. Overall, I saw far more Obama signs in and around Asheville, but the biggest billboards tended to be Republican. To think of all that money spent on changing nothing…
When my library school friend, Diane, invited me on a trip to ‘Ecolodge’ just outside Algonquin Park, I jumped at the chance to spend three consecutive days out of range of phone and internet. The lakeside lodge is completely off-the-grid, powered by its own micro-hydro construction along a waterfall. The property was once part of a logging mill, but the trails are now used by snowshoers and cross-country skiers. Even lazy me snowshoed around on a -20C morning!
Not shown in the photos below:
