THURSDAY, 8/31:
How do you know you're staying at a
fantastic hotel? You know when they leave mini-versions of the
world's best chocolate bars on your pillow to greet you when you
arrive.
Greetings from the aforementioned
place, the Hotel Melba in Bastogne, Belgium. We arrived here a mere
26 hours after leaving Marquette yesterday morning, which means that
in the over course of slightly longer than one day we were in two
U.S. states and four different countries before getting here. But
then, we saw those chocolate bars when we walked in and everything
was all worth it.
Even having to put up with screaming
babies right behind us on not one but two of the three legs of our
flight.
It's funny; this is the sixth time
we've stayed at this hotel, which is owned by a married couple, and
when we checked in she looked at us like she had seen us before.
Then when we told her she had (and gave her a copy of Loraine's book
“Elden's True Army Tales”, written about someone who died near
here), she was speechless beyond belief.
Maybe tomorrow we'll each get two
pieces of mini-chocolate!
Speaking of chocolate, where's the
first place we went after we checked in? How about the holy grail of
choco-holics, the Carrefour store a kilometer down the street from
here--
Sure, I drooled a bit and maybe even
shed a tear or two, but, believe it or not, we didn't buy much today.
That comes tomorrow when we visit the factory outlets stores for two
of the brands (Galler and Jacques) that you see pictured above.
Loraine said she'll bring extra Kleenex
just in case either of us need them.
One of the interesting things about
flying today was that we had to spend a couple of hours in London
waiting for our flight to Dusseldorf. And since today's the 20th
anniversary of the death of Princess Diana, Loraine, who always
thought very highly of her, took the opportunity to pick a few
newspapers & read up on how people are feeling, two decades
later.
That's basically the first day of our
trip in a nutshell, unless you wanna be bored by the misadventure
that was us trying to find where our rental car was parked at the
Dusseldorf airport (and Deanna, as an aside, you were absolutely
right). I was driving so I couldn't take pictures, but I was stunned
at the transformation that occurs pretty much instantaneously as
you cross the border from Germany to Belgium. Driving in Germany is
like driving on an American interstate. You see exit signs,
cloverleaf interchanges, and wild drivers treating the road like
their own personal Formula One track. Then you get into Belgium and
the road become a little narrower, the scenery a little more bucolic,
and the drivers just a tad more polite.
THAT was interesting.
Okay, because we didn't do much today
and I haven't slept for 30-some hours, I'll wrap this up with a
couple of images from our walk down to Chocolate Heaven (excuse me,
the Carrefour store). First of all, I notice that clothing stores
around here are starting to develop some rather interesting names...
There's a new business that's opened
since we were last here--
That (literally) translates to “Museum of Pigs”,
but it's not a place where they venerate Porky or that one pig who
built his house out of bricks. Nope; it's actually a museum
dedicated to ham, some of which they produce in copious amounts
around here.
And look what else they're doing in
Bastogne!
The umbrella concept does seem to be
popping up a lot around the world, and this may be the most extreme
example. An entire city block is covered by the umbrellas, and as
far as we could count there were over 1,000 of them hung in the air.
Almost puts the Rosewood umbrella
display in Marquette to shame, doesn't it? Almost. Although my
personal opinion is that our display has better colors to it. Maybe
next year the Marquette DDA should try covering a whole city block
with them. We'll show Bastogne!
Tomorrow, we do a little research for
Loraine, visit a few places we haven't visited before, and buy a
whole bunch of chocolate. If you behave, I'll even post a picture
when we're done.
8-)
