I know there are lots of nice places in Belgium (especially for art and history, such as shown in the In Bruges movie), but I was glad to get out of there after my first day on the continent. It had started well, with a lift from Ostend port to the edge of Brussels, but it was raining all the time there, and it was ages before I got a lift. I later pitched my tent in a field, which flooded after more rain! So I was glad to get into France, which had been my initial first destination before being offered the return ticket to Ostend.
I took my first photo in Lille, featured a couple of blog posts ago in the first of this series looking back at my first travel 30 years ago, and also made my first sterling to foreign currency transaction; in the pre-Euro Europe. Here’s the receipt:
I know countries’ borders are only on maps, ground and water, and not in the weather; and was probably due to it being another day rather than country, but it did dry up in France, and Paris greeted me with hot summer sunshine. More of that next time…
My first travel memoir, The Guns N’ Roses Worker-Traveller, was published by Chipmunka, and I have since written several more, available on Amazon.
Travel 25 Years... and more 