Journey: None
Distance: 0 km
Campsite for the night: Camping Les Murets
YouTube link: coming soon …

Today we went to Liège — not because we’ve always had a burning desire to but because we could! The campsite had a very handy train station a 5 minutes walk away with hourly trains to Liège. I’d looked online at the things to do and there weren’t many highlights other than the many steps and a train station. However, the weather didn’t look especially great and we were both tired so it seemed like a good way to spend the day.

The train to Liège was great, it was on time, quick and cheap. As always, trains in Europe are so superior to trains at home in every way, I don’t know how we have such an expensive yet crap system.

We got off the train a stop earlier than needed so we could visit one of the must sees of Liège — the Gare de Liège-Guillemins — initially we were underwhelmed and couldn’t see anything special about the station. But as we got outside, we saw the impressive colourful sweeping roof and were suitably impressed.

From there, we took a detour to a Mr. Bricolage — basically a French version of B&Q — to get a couple of spanners. I’d tried to fix Emma’s puncture a couple of days before and realised the handy tools that had come with the bike weren’t that handy after all as they didn’t include any way of getting the back wheel off. As always, Mr. Bricolage didn’t let us down and we soon had two of the finest spanners ready to tackle the bike problem.

We continued our stroll into Liège, it’s a nice enough city, but definitely not that exciting. However, it does have a vegan cafe, which was our next destination. Ventre Content was a cool little place, with different art on the walls and a simple but tasty menu. We both had the toasties, which I very much enjoyed and Emma was less enthusiastic about.

After lunch, we headed for the main attraction — the Montagne de Bueren. This ‘mountain’ consists of many steps up and is apparently 374 metres long. I can attest to the fact that is does feel like a long way and is quite a climb up. There were houses directly off the steps on either side, so you’d be very fit if you lived in one of them.

At the top, once we got our breath back, we had great views out across the city and it felt a bit greener. It was also nearer our next destination, a vegan patisserie imaginatively named La Pâtisserie Vegan. We got there quite close to closing so there weren’t any croissants left, but they had some fantastic looking cakes. We chose two that looked good and picked up a couple of pistachio cookies for the next day. On the train back to the campsite, we ate the cakes. Emma’s was the chocolatey cakey mousse type thing that she loves and I’d managed to pick up a lemon meringue tart, which was delicious. I’d highly recommend the climb up to the La Pâtisserie Vegan if you find yourself in Liège.

Once back at the campsite, we decided to do a final supermarket run that evening to stock up on Belgium beers because we’d changed our plans again and decided to bring our channel tunnel crossing forward to the following evening. We’d realised that our original plan of staying in Bruges the night before our channel crossing would mean a very early start and a very long day, whereas this way we could stay at Folkestone for the night and have a much easier trip home.

The drive to the supermarket was fairly awful, the roads really aren’t great and were quite busy. We also hit the supermarket at a busy time and even though it was a Carrefour, our favourite supermarket abroad, we just weren’t feeling it. Possibly we were also suffering from FSF (foreign supermarket fatigue) by this point!

We had our final night abroad, enjoying the free ranging chickens, a Belgium beer at the bar and some dominoes in the van.