Tuesday, June 24: Ypres, Belgium

We woke this morning to a chuch bell that rang for about 15 minutes straight. Jack said it tolled 169 times. Maybe in memory of folks who died in WWI on this day 100 years ago?

We needed to resolve the issue with the internet, so headed to McDonald's for lunch and free wifi. I found that the initial information I received was wrong and that I cannot use my phone to connect my computer to the internet. We still have basic email on the phone, but I cannot update the blog with photos from my camera, so we will have to rely on free wifi for blog updates.

After doing as much as I could on McDonald's wifi, we headed to a different named grocery store. This was a much better store than Aldi's, a bit upscale with good selection but jeeze, they are still labeling everything in Flemish – imagine that.

We are finally getting more familiar with road signage and are more comfortable observing roadsides instead of just reading signs. We have begun to notice that they have mostly lazy cows here – most are laying down all the time! Also lots of two-story greenhouses that we finally figured out were for growing produce in the off-season.

Here is one of the unique European road situations we have been encountering...driving down a nice, wide two-lane road, they arbitrarily narrow it to one lane, forcing you to either play chicken or stop and let the oncoming car go through first.

We returned to the same campground at the sports complex after a day of humdrum errands. It also gave us a chance to find out what happened to the man who fell ill yesterday. He is still alive, but in a coma. No one knows how long he was in the field before the man found him, so they do not know if he will have serious brain damage. He was 51 years old and a regular at the sports complex. Very sad.

I did some laundry by hand since laundromats are hard to find and harder to find parking for and campgrounds supposedly will have one small washing machine and maybe a dryer.

 We had a light dinner of appetizers – some wonderful Belgian cheese and crackers and some stuffed mushrooms. We are still struggling with the 6 hour time difference, but are slowly adjusting. We are tired and hungry at unexpected times. It will work itself out, but I wish it would hurry.