Raining to beat the band this morning. Had another nice breakfast and suited up with the rain gear. Time to make the best of the day.
We all stopped at a local marina for our lunch - again some went inside to eat while the rest of us stayed outside to eat our bag lunches. Tom said that the marina was pretty "stuffy" with rules about having to eat something, etc. So, most of us stayed outside - at least we found a bit of shelter.
5 of us decided to take off from the main group and try to finish the 26 miles in a reasonable amount of time. Pete and Liz had a good map and we figured we couldn't do to much to get lost as we were basically following the canal all the way to Bruges!
We made it to a castle - off limit to visitors so we just took a couple of pictures. The pelaton caught up to us at the castle just as we were leaving. After a short time we found our way back to the canal and saw our boat chugging along. Connie was staying on the boat as she had a sinus/sore throat problem with a slight fever. So I waved to her as we got ready to take a short loop through the countryside away from the canal. We missed a turnoff and went about a mile out of our way before we realized our mistake. Heading back we were blocked for a bit as a school bus was dropping some little ones off at a local school! Cute! Back on the "right" path there was the rest of the group again! We stopped at a local bar for a few minutes and had a small bite to eat. I went inside for a minute and there were about 5 local older guys pounding back Belgium beers at 11:30ish. I sat outside while a bunch went inside (not much room at all in there). The 5 of us bottled off again and rode parallel to the canal for a while more. It was really too bad that it was raining all of the time! Not too much, but just enough to make it a bit unpleasant. The wind was way down and the riding was pretty easy.
We were off again and about 5 miles later were found the boat docked a bit outside of Bruges. Most everybody stayed on the boat in the afternoon. We only took about 3 hours of riding today - we agreed this was the way to do it. Drawbridge opening for us to pass thru into Bruges.
This evening the boat moved to the very south edge of Brugge before dinner. We had veal tenderloin with Belgian French Fres (with mayonnaise). That's how the Belgians eat them - pretty good. When in Rome.
Tom took us out for a walk around Bruges tonight - beautiful. We got a feel for the place - we will be taking a short ride tomorrow morning, returning to Bruges for shopping in the afternoon. Most are going all the way to the ocean for a bit of beach but we decided we need to shop.
Hopefully tomorrow will be a pleasant day for our last day in Bruges.
Saturday morning early we will leave the boat and head for Brussels. The train station is less than a mile away so we can schlep the gear for the 1 hour train ride to Brussels.
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