Our daughter lives in Barcelona and flew to Las Vegas in February 2007 along with her future husband and his parents. They were married in Las Vegas and spent a week with us before they returned to Barcelona. My wife and I made our plans to fly to Europe in October 2007 to attend the Spanish celebration of their wedding. While looking at the map of Europe my wife said its only 800 miles from Amsterdam to Barcelona, let's rent a car and drive. Normally we fly to Amsterdam, change planes and then fly to Barcelona. Since we were going to be in Europe for a month we could rent a car and expand our trip to a few other countries.
I have served with the U.S. Navy and spent over 13 years in Europe, so for me it was not such a big deal; but, for my wife it was her trip of a lifetime. After arriving in Amsterdam we took local transportation to the downtown area and picked up our rental car. Something for travelers to know is that if you pick up your rental at the airport you will end up paying more.
After a night in Hotel Ibis (pronounced eb) we headed toward Brugge, Belgium, our first destination. I don't know how my wife knew to pick out this as our destination but we spent three wonderful days wondering the pedestrian only streets. We were looking for the lace makers but that trade seemed to be a thing of the past. We purchased a few small samples as gifts but could not really find anyone still making the lace. The weather was misting for the three day we were there but we both enjoy the cooler weather. We also took a horse and carriage ride throughout the town and then wound up our stay with a ride on the canal boats.
Brugge is a wonderful city to visit. Our visit was very enjoyable and I highly recommend it as a great place to visit. We had scheduled three days in Brugge to await our daughter and son-in-law to meet us in Frankfurt, Germany. We left Brugge to drive to Frankfurt and I will describe our trip to Frankfurt, Munich and Salzburg in my next article.