2 years!  It’s already been two wonderful years since we got married, definitely hard to believe.  This year in particular has been a busy one with the purchase of our first home (finally!) and it’s subsequent gutting and renovations.

In order to celebrate this year, we decided to keep it simple and found an excellent deal for a weekend away in Belgium with EuroStar.  It was our intention to spend our 3 days in Brussels, but we ended up hopping over to Bruges for one of the days and it was definitely worth it.

The first day we walked ourselves ragged all over Brussels visiting all of the local tourist attractions we could find.  The favourite was obviously the little Manneken Pis, photographed on different days in different outfits.  He’s actually really small, probably only 2 feet tall or so, but very cute and a big draw.

Danni had once again selected an excellent hotel (this is one of her many magical powers) and everything was easily within walking distance from our doorstep.  We spent the fading hours of sunlight in the Grand Place getting a few photos of the incredible architecture. The town hall in particular was stunning and I took an awful lot of images of it during our stay there.

I dragged my tripod along again and unlike our trip to Northern Ireland, this time it actually got some use.  In addition to the low-light photos, we also did quite a few portraits of the two of us.  I really should do more of these though, I much prefer looking back on the the photos we’re in vs. images of buildings (if you’re a random internet stranger you may have a different opinion on this however).

Day 2 and we were up early to catch the train (from the station directly across the street from our hotel, well done again Danni) to Bruges.   I’m so glad we went as I think it’s one of my favourite cities so far.  It’s everything you could ever want in a medieval European town.  Cobbled streets everywhere, old buildings, canals, lovely food, not particularly crowded and oh so photogenic.  I could have easily spent a few more days there just taking photos.

There’s definitely a Venice/Amsterdam vibe to the city.  To me, it felt like the best of both of those cities.  It wasn’t as claustrophobic as Venice, and the buildings and streets felt older and more interesting than Amsterdam.  I don’t know if we just picked the right time of year, but it was also much less busy and touristy than either (especially Venice).

We also go pretty lucky with the weather too I think.  It was moody and misty when we arrived in the morning, but by late afternoon the sun was out and prompted a lovely sky as dusk approached.

We had to make sure to get a photo of us in front of the clock tower.  We watched In Bruges before and after our trip (great movie by the way, subtitles are handy to understand some of the thick Irish accents though!) and the tower features in the movie a couple of times, as does the location of the next shot.

We had our anniversary dinner in the white building on the right at a lovely table by the windows.  It was a really nice evening and a great way to spend our 2nd anniversary together.

Our final day saw us visiting the Comic Strip Museum in Brussels (interesting, but apart from Astrix, Tintin and the Smurfs I didn’t recognize any of the strips and only about 20% of the information presented was in English), and shopping for Beer & Chocolates (yes, in Belgium they both need to be capitalized).

All in all, lovely weekend with my lovely wife in a lovely part of the world.  Who could ask for anything more?

I suppose you could ask for more photos, good point.  They’re here, as always.