After the prolonged nightmare that is international flight, Stephannie and I took a train from the Brussels Airport into the Brussels Centrale Station, and then another on to Brugge. That only took a little more than an hour, and was comfortable, as European trains always are. (It was to be my last time on a train without a bicycle for quite a while--a luxury I didn't yet understand.) It was late afternoon by the time we checked into the hotel. We were arriving the day before everyone else in the Blue Marble group, so there wasn't anyone around for us to meet up with. We walked around a little, stopped for some drinks at an outdoor cafe, and then had dinner. The drinks were Belgian beer, which is by far the best I have ever had, and dinner was moules frites (that is, mussels and french fries).

Brugge is a beautiful city. It has been called the "Venice of the North," but that's a little misleading. There are a few canals (as there seem to be in most cities of any size in northern Europe), but there are also many roads and cars, which you won't see in Venice. Yet like Venice, there is an old and gorgeous city center filled with tourists, with most of the local residents living outside of this area. As on the rest of this trip, I did not consult any guides or guidebooks, so all of my impressions are based only on what I was able to see and hear, and are therefore likely to be inaccurate.

The next morning, I was up early for breakfast in the hotel, and then headed out to wander the city. I walked for a couple of hours, never circling very far from the hotel. I found the place in the center of the city, and a very impressive looking church and its grounds. Then, as would often happen over the next two weeks, it began to rain. It was a light rain, and I got back to the hotel without getting very wet. Our coordinator, Sue (the closest thing to Superwoman you'll ever meet), was at the hotel with a few of our bikes when I got back. Stephannie and I went out to get lunch and riding supplies (water and cookies), and then started on our first ride.

The ride was to be a 30k loop out of Brugge to the North Sea and back. This was my first experience with a Blue Marble route sheet, and I became very concerned about the rest of the trip. I have been given bad directions before--an omitted landmark, a forgotten turn--but this route sheet gave every appearance of malicious intent. Whole sentences would be given to describing things that we were to ignore. The scale would vary randomly from a couple of meters to several kilometers. It was diabolical. We made it as far as the small town of Lissewege, about 4k from the ocean, and then gave up and decided to come back by the bike path along a highway into Brugge. Luckily, that was by far the worst route sheet we saw on the trip, and it made following subsequent route sheets seem fairly simple.

The ride itself was lovely (until we decided to follow the highway) and dead flat. We wandered bike paths and back roads through farms and the occasional wooded area. The rain was gone, and it was warm and hazy.

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