Driving on The Continent: France, Luxembourg, and Belgium

This was the first Christmas Brian and I have ever spent away from Florida and our families, so we decided to go ahead and travel somewhere instead of just staying home by ourselves.  As you can imagine, flights during this time were really expensive, so we opted to take a car ferry over to The Continent instead the day after Christmas.  We began our adventure from Dover, England, and took a 1 1/2-hour ferry ride across to Calais, France.  It was great seeing the White Cliffs of Dover and experiencing how close England is to the rest of Europe, although I discovered I do suffer from seasickness!!

Taking the car ferry is an interesting experience because when you board the ferry, you are driving on the left side of the road in England, but 1 1/2 hours later, you exit the ferry and have to drive on the right side.  It's so confusing driving a British car on American-like roads!  Luckily we made it through without any incidents.  =)

Once we arrived in France, we made our way to Luxembourg, with brief stops in Saint Quentin, France, and Florenville, Belgium.  In Luxembourg we found another Christmas market with more great food, including cheese fondue over bread in a little bowl for only 5 Euros - that definitely made our day!  The weather wasn't great though, and the roads were very icy from snow the previous week, but we still had a wonderful time. 

After Luxembourg, we drove into Belgium to visit Brussels, Ghent, and Bruges.  Driving in the large city of Brussels was one of the scariest experiences of my life, and overall we found we didn't love the city.  What we're discovering is that the major cities around the world all kind of have the same feel.  We much prefer the smaller towns where you get a real feel of a country's culture.  After only a day in Brussels, we made our way to the rest of Belgium.  We really enjoyed the towns of Ghent and Bruges, but once again, the weather was absolutely miserable so we really didn't see their true beauty.  We will have to go back when it's not freezing and raining!

The funniest story (now that we look back) on this whole experience was that our hotel in Bruges didn't have our reservation so they had to put us at another hotel.  With all of the travel we do, we figured something like this would happen at some point.  We ended up at this small restaurant/hotel where we were the only guests.  We were outside of Bruges in the small town of Jabbeke that seriously did not have a single open restaurant.  We finally drove around for a while and ended up at a buffet restaurant.  The next night we ended up getting a pizza from a stand on the side of the road in the town because we didn't want to drive anywhere on the icy roads.  It was definitely quite the adventure!

So what we learned from this trip is that a lot of the smaller areas of Europe close during this time and the weather can be quite miserable (especially for Floridians who are used to sunny Christmases!).  Next year, if we travel around this time, we will be heading south!  =)

Here are a few pictures we took on our trip.  Hope you enjoy!