It may come as a shock to some, but we’re actually paying €19 to park here for 24 hours. It’s just a barriered motorhome carpark, with minimal facilities, and a main road behind our heads. We’re treating this as an exception as Bruges has no other viable overnighting possibilities that we can see, and anyway, Bruges is somewhere we’ve always wanted to visit, so less than £9 each doesn’t seem so bad if you think of it like that.

We’ll soon be leaving the warmth of our lovely and cosy motorhome to go out into the cold and dark to explore Bruges, whose famous Christmas markets kick off today. Actually it’s just started raining, so hopefully it won’t persist it down like in Ghent last night. Oh dear, here it comes.

As always, I’m in charge of map reading, so I have the added pressure of ensuring we keep to the optimal route, don’t take any unnecessary turns, as well as making sure that every major site has been visited. Of course, whilst leading this military like expedition, I’ll be spending most of the time being asked to get out of the way because I’ll be ruining the photos, or I’ll just be hanging around in the cold whilst Sophie ensures that she has photographed every conceivable angle of every lovely building, canal, tree, lamppost etc etc

I’m pleased to report that we only had a couple of short showers of rain, and just in the early part of our night time visit. It was cold, but Bruges was very attractive, pretty Christmassy, and jam-packed with other tourists.

Sophie is not a great fan of walking, particularly if it is just a means to an end. She needs entertainment for the whole route, and so this makes my job even tougher. Anyway, it took no time at all for the camera to come out, so I was confident that all would be fine.

To extend our energy levels we decided on having a meal out, as it had been at least 10 days since we last did, and in our usual style, scoured all the set dinner menus, plumping for one actually in the main square. We were planning to avoid this section as we thought it would be overpriced, which was generally the case, but we found the exception with a roaring fire and a set menu that included steak plus a glass of wine or beer, so that appealed to us. We weren’t overly optimistic as to the quality of the dishes that would appear, but to be fair, the food was of a good standard.

After putting all our layers of warm clothes back on after the meal, we braved the cold again and wandered around the Christmas market stalls and ice rink. Sophie couldn’t resist the candy floss, whilst for me the glühwein with Amaretto was too tempting to forego, and very nice it was too.

We continued our meandering and worked our way back to the warm van.