February 4, 2017 – February 5, 2017

When I first started this blog, I told myself that I would keep up to date on my posts and make sure to finish one entry before going on my next adventure. Well, it’s 9 o’clock on a Friday night, and my next adventure begins in about 10 hours so I’d better make this a quick one. Here goes…

I went to Bruges expecting a beer festival, and was pleasantly surprised by how beautiful and quaint the small city is. We (Tyler and I, plus our go-to travel buddies Maggie and Martin) rented a car on Saturday morning to make the three hour trek. As we were off to a later than anticipated start, by the time we made it to our AirBnB we were ready to drop our things off and head to the festival.

Little did we know that not only did we book an AirBnB, but it was actually a real B&B, with an old man owner who gave us a 30 minute history lesson on Bruges, complete with the history of all of the furniture in his house, and a map of the city with all of the must visit places. By the time he had finished, we were ready for a beer.

The beer festival is said to be one of the top festivals in Europe with an estimated 20,000 visitors to the small city during the weekend. I will say, it was very crowded. But, there was also some really great beers! It was different than the beer festivals in Nashville where you get unlimited beer for a set price. Here you have to purchase tokens for each beer you want. It actually made me appreciate the beer more, and I was thoughtful about my choices.

Post beer fest, we went to our dinner reservations at this quiet, small restaurant where the dining room was downstairs in a cave. Apparently, we were the only people there who had been to the beer fest and in hindsight we maybe should have gone to somewhere with a louder atmosphere. I’m sure the other customers weren’t too happy to hear us arguing about Davey Crockett. Anyways, it was a great day with great friends.

Since we didn’t really see the city on our first day, we spent the whole day on Sunday walking through the city village. Per discussion with our local historian, most of the city was built in medieval times, and was a thriving city due to its position near the water. The vikings never pillaged through the town because they bought wool coats from the traders (or something). Anyway, the point of this, is that it is a really old town with a lot of beautiful architecture.

We’ve already decided we’re coming back to Bruges next year for round 2 of the beer fest – if anyone wants to join!