During February and March, Willow and I have been flexing our DIY muscles and done some major flat renovations. It was a very intense period and mentally challenging. I think that the fact that we came out at the end of the tunnel with our mental health still intact is great achievement in itself.
So as a well deserved break from all the flat-renovation-madness, Willow and I decided to use the easter weekend and the following bank holiday to get away from the Do-It-Yourself battlefield of Flat 7 and go to Belgium.
London to Brussels with the Eurostar takes only 1hr 51 minutes from Kings Cross station. That’s about the same amount of time you need to be in advance at the airport if you’re flying somewhere. Yeah — trains rule, planes suck.
We decided to take our bikes with us. We have talked about doing a bike holiday for quite some time and thought that bringing them along would be a good initial test. The Eurostar website makes it sound so easy; cheap and accessible, but, unfortunately for us, it turned out being expensive and complicated.
When we arrived at the station on Thursday morning we found out that the Eurostar Dispatch doesn’t open until 6 a.m while we needed to board at 5:30am. This resulted to us taking a later train. A simular thing happened on our return; when we arrived back in London at 10:04pm on Tuesday and the Eurostar Dispatch had already closed at 10pm. So we had to revisit Kings Cross on Wednesday to collect our bikes. On top of this, if you have two bikes and want to send them return to Brussels, it will set you back around £80.
We stayed in Brussels at the lovely August’ INN, a bed and breakfast run by architect Geoffroy Lemaigre and his wife Sophie van der Dussen. It was really nice. This underlines that Willow does have an amazing gift on finding nice places to stay when on holiday, and that the Bed & Coffee we stayed at in New York was not a fluke.
Besides Brussels, Willow and I took the train to Antwerpen, Brugge, Gent and Amsterdam. Yeah, again — trains rule (except for the bike thing of course).
So, to summarise and wrap up this totally uninteresting post — I liked Belgium and was very impressed by Amsterdam. I’m now even more fond of Belgium beer and an Easter weekend in Belgium gets very chocolat’y.
When i was younger i had a belief that in one of my previous lives i was a successful business women in New York. I thought once i go to New York i will feel familiar with the city, it’s people and it’s roads. I believed New York and I had some previous life history together; almost family blood band. Once i go there i wouldn’t want to come back to wherever i came from. As i have grown older this belief has faded, but going there for the first time brought the memories of the belief back. It turned out NY and I didn’t have that much in common. Maybe my belief was wrong — there is no pre-life, maybe NY has changed since i lived there as a business women. Most probably, i just had a romantic view of the Big Apple.
Before we left for New York, Willow brought some film for her Polaroid camera and a 
This past weekend, the entire company of POKE went on a city break together. Third year running, this little “company get away” has become a nice little tradition. First year we (then 12) went to Tuscany in Italy, last year we (then 28) went to Sussex in England and this year we (40) went to Llangadog in Wales (just west of Brecon Beacons National Park). I don’t want to compare them to each other, since they have less incommon than common. What they do have in common, though, is that they are a bucket full of fun.
Yeah… I know; Italy, 
A holiday is no longer about the journey. 9 times out of 10 it’s all about the destination. The journey works more as a reminder and indicator that we are actually going somewhere; telling our body and mind that we have gone somewhere else; that things are now different and we can now look upon people with an objective mind, like if we were visiting animals at the zoo.
Willow’s cousin, Patrick, was in the car that drove us from Orlando Airport to Willow’s uncle’s, Brian, house. We asked him how far we had left to drive until we would arrive to the house. He didn’t know. Can’t blame him. Every other mile was just a repeat of the previous one. Like a vinyl record with a big scratch on it or a catchy radio song. Deja vu.
I received two main reactions from people when I told them that I was going on holiday to Hel, Poland. Swedes tended to say “Poland?”, as in “Why?”, while English speaking people instead, picked up on the fact that Hel is pronounced Hell – as in opposite to Heaven.
