Brussels Sept 3-5, 2014

Brussels was a very good place to start this trip.  Lovely, laid back, great chocolate, easy to walk to sights, lots of people speak English.  I've been using my rusty French a little.  Not so rush-rush as big cities typically are. Easy to get back to the apartment to rest when needed.   Felt very good to be here.  There’s something about walking down cobblestone roads past really old ornate buildings.  

We decided before we left that we'd only try to do one main thing a day.  Today it was visit the Comic Museum which was interesting.  There’s comic artwork around the town.  Large cartoon characters and TinTin paintings are a few we saw.

There are several different museums in Brussels but we are mainly saving our museum treks for the larger museums such as the Louvre, Vatican Museum and British Museum.  We didn't want to burn out the kids on museums before we reach the biggies.

Grocery shopping and eating in general involves a lot of guessing.  It has pretty much been working out.  I didn't try this but here's an example.

We rented an apartment through airbnb.  So far our first experience with airbnb has been really good.  Staying in hotels for 3 ½ months would be too expensive.  Same with hostels.  There are few things we knew we’d need to help make this a success.  Room to spread out a bit, a kitchen for cooking and a slow travel pace.   Plus liberal amounts of ice cream, chocolates and pastries.

Our Brussels host even told us some insider tips such as which streets have the best chocolate shops.  We are in apartments all through the trip except for 3 days in a youth hostel in Geneva.  We haven’t worked out the details for the UK part of the trip yet.

Next we move on to Trier, Germany.