Day trips in my family tend to take the form of several hours in a hot car on the way to the south coast, followed by 40 minutes wandering aimlessly over sand-dunes as storm clouds gather, and then another couple of hours in the car, in order to arrive back home in a foul temper. The temper is partly induced by having to spend what seems an inordinate amount time in a confined space with our nearest and dearest, and partly by the fact that whenever we choose to make these day trips, every single restaurant, café and hot food stall on the south coast has closed for the day, forcing us to eat our ‘emergency’ bacon sandwiches, which have spent the journey down congealing in a sorry brown paper bag.
Perhaps one day I will reminisce about these trips as the crowning joy of my youth, but I sincerely doubt it.
It seemed almost too good to be true, then, when I was offered a family outing to Bruges for the day, prompted by the film ‘In Bruges’. Pouncing on the idea, I assured my father that the journey would be painless and cheap, and so we had booked and paid for the Dover-Calais Eurotunnel crossing within minutes of the mini-break being suggested – I use the word “mini-break” hesitantly, as it conjures up the image of couples ensconced in Paris hotel rooms, but I’ve run out of synonyms, so you’ll just have to grin and bear it. We decided to travel by car, as opposed to Eurostar, because the flexible ticketing system allowed us to deviate from our schedule as much or as little as we wanted.
I didn’t escape from the emergency bacon sandwiches, which were furtively packed into the well of the passenger seat just before we left home at five o’clock in the morning for Dover. The journey, however, was as painless as I had promised. Four hours door to door, most of it was spent on the fast-flowing, seamlessly flat motorway in Flanders which delivers you straight to the outskirts of Bruges.
It must be noted that Bruges is a picturesque but very strange place. I have never been to a city before whose inhabitants subsist entirely on pralines and lace, or so it seems, at least, when you look at the shops in the city centre, which uniformly alternate between chocolatiers and haberdasheries. Having said that, I’m not entirely sure that I can claim to have actually seen any natives of Bruges during the eight or so hours we spent in the city, as there were more tourists than you could shake a Thomas Cook brochure at. But when you get used to the idea that Bruges is essentially a life-size version of Disney World, and actually buy into the whole thing, you begin to enjoy it. We took a boat ride along the city’s canals, and climbed the belfry, and lunched on traditional Belgian Waterzooi stew. We even visited the quieter residential districts of the city, with their architectural mix of modernist and traditional Flemish styles, and their liberating lack of Segway-touting tour groups, which plague the city’s two main squares.
For a city of such small stature, Bruges has an incredibly rich variety of sights, from the manicured Beguinage monastery to the enormous Gothic town hall, and the small but perfectly formed Groeninge museum, which houses one third of Belgium’s national collection of Flemish art. If you’re prepared to spend half a day travelling and half a day soaking up art, culture and food – and why not? – then Bruges could be the perfect day trip.
> Bruges travel guides and maps
Author: James White