Our final day in Ghent and once more we set out from the hotel to find somewhere for breakfast. We stumbled upon a place that looked nice inside but also had a wonderful array of baked products in the window, including the one shown above. I wish that I had paid more attention when I was told what it was but I didn’t and so I can’t tell you. However, I can describe it as it was like a sweet bun with lots of chocolate pieces in it. Lovely! But not great for the waistline…
Breakfast out the way we initially went to the heart of the city where the canal is and the tourist boats wait. We had intended to take a boat trip around to see things we hadn’t and from a different perspective but due to a combination of indifference and the cold we skipped that and chose to walk along the canal instead.
There was along the banks of the canal what I initially thought was a market but instead it was stall after stall of books and it was a lovely sight. Of course most of the volumes were in a language I couldn’t understand but there was one stall run by a Brit in a West Ham hat selling English language volumes. However, he was deep in conversation with another Brit about Brexit so I moved swiftly on.
We did consider going back to Frites Artisan for lunch but chips and mayo two days running did seem a bit much. In the end we found ourselves in a place where the food wasn’t as good as the chips, which was a shame for our last meal.
So it was time to make our way back home. We grabbed a cab back to the station and on arrival found that the train we had been intending to take was cancelled (found courtesy of Google Translate). The previous train was running 20 minutes late so we could get that which we did.
Turns out that there was a reason it was 20 minutes late – it was running very sloooooooooooooooowly and the longer the journey went on the more and more likely it appeared that we were going to miss our connection. The next Eurostar was fully booked and the one after that expensive so we were keen to not miss our train and were therefore willing the train to go faster.
We knew that the Eurostar deks close 30 minutes before departure and by the time we had dashed from our train to the desk there were only 10 minutes to go. Of course we made a mad panicky dash through customs only to end up in a queue waiting to board the train! We’d made it with minutes to spare but it didn’t half give us a fright!