The first post of our new website! Since we are soon to be more than Rich and Cat, I thought it was about time to move us over to a new domain; thelenkes.com!
Here we will continue to have stories about our lives, adventures, and travels, but I’m sure it’s going to be plastered with stuff about Wesley when he arrives. In the meantime here is our last trip before Wesley is born.
When we started thinking about a last trip, we thought we might go to see my family in Charleston, SC. We like the city, we like the food, it’s easy to get around on foot within the historic central area, and it seemed like a relaxing place to visit.
You probably noticed the title of this post isn’t “Charleston Babymoon.”
There’s a great website called SkyScanner. There you can enter your travel dates and choose a destination of “anywhere.” The site will show you the lowest priced flights for destinations all over the world. When we saw LAX to Brussels for $264 we had to find out more.
Once we clicked on the page and found the specific flights we noticed that the first flight was listed as 38 hours! Then we looked a little closer to realize that included a 23 hour layover in London. Awesome! Without taking time off of work, we were able to leave Friday at 5:30pm, take a red eye to London, spend 23 hours running around London, leave the next morning for Brussels, another 23 hours hitting the sites in Brussels, and back home in time for work on Tuesday (it was a 3 day holiday weekend) morning!
First stop, customs. Luckily there wasn’t much of a line and the process was pretty quick. And it’s a good thing since we’ve got so much to do in such little time!
A beautiful sunset in Notting Hill
The Portobello Market is a large, outdoor and indoor market that spans 5 or so blocks. While it’s known for antiques, all kinds of goods can be found from new and vintage clothes to pewter flasks, from souvenir shirts and bags to vinyl records. Yes…vinyl records. I had chosen a record store to visit in each city, and when we arrived at the shop in our neighborhood in London I found 8 or so small bins lining the wall, each of them containing a different era of ska/reggae and dubstep. The selection was small, prices were high, and the genre was, well, one note. While exploring Portobello Market, however, I found a man with even fewer bins of records along the road. Curious, I had to stop and look since the store earlier had been such a bust. To my delight, each bin was labeled with names like “Morrisey and the Smiths”, “Queen”, “The Beatles”, and “Pink Floyd”. If I had an extra suitcase I would have bought the man’s entire booth. As it was, I purchased an original English print of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”, and I would have to carry it delicately through trains, cars, airports, and planes for the next 2 days.
What’s London without beer and fish and chips? We found a nearby pub and dove in. Cat couldn’t have much beer since she’s pregnant, but we both really loved the crispy fish at the Duke of Wellington.
Always helpful tip when in a country that drives on the wrong side of the road. Look Right!
We wanted to maximize the time we had in each place on our trip. In London that meant walking Portobello Road a lot. We went out for sightseeing to Portobello Road. Dinner…Portobello Road. Cocktails…Portobello Road. Here we are with a his (on the right with alcohol) and hers (on the left without) at Portobello Star. It was small, dark, cramped, and pretty fun. The bartender was nice enough to make Cat a really delicious fresh fruit mocktail.
We decided to end the night with beers in our hotels pub. I’ve just realized that this far into the post I haven’t yet talked about our hotel! We really loved it here. Extremely central in Notting Hill, the hotel was located right in the middle of everything we wanted to do and see. The KPH (Kensington Park Hotel) was originally built in 1860 as a public house (which is a fancy way to say a pub). It is virtually unchanged and is still recognizable from old photographs. They’ve been slinging beer here for 160 years! The room was modern and clean. Even with a pub on the bottom floor, a restaurant on the second floor, and our bedroom on the third, the room was quiet and comfortable. Having a pub and restaurant in the building wasn’t so bad either! We didn’t eat here, but the beer selection and service were great.
Cat is always sending postcards.
There are about to be a lot of pictures of breakfast. This was quite possibly the best breakfast I’ve ever had anywhere in the world. While English food is notoriously bland, a full English will set you right up for the day.
The Electric Diner did everything right for their full English. Sweet, roasted tomato, herb seasoned portabello mushroom, thick slabs of bacon, beautiful orange yolked eggs, thick sourdough bread…I’ve got to stop before I drool on my keyboard. Even the blood sausage was delicious! I don’t eat baked beans, but I’m pretty sure this plate could have been reused without washing by the time I finished breakfast.
For breakfast, there must be potatoes. Again, they didn’t disappoint! These were fried so crispy you could pick them up with your hands and eat them like giant french fries. As you bit in, you would find the soft, warm potato center waiting for you surrounded by the crunch. So good.
We would have just enough time and English Pounds left to run across the street just as the tea store was opening for souvenirs and some black tea to add to Cat’s test tube collection.
Similar to other places we’ve been, sometimes you see things as you drive by. This was the case of the European Union Headquarters in Brussels. Here’s the photo of us passing the building in our Uber from the airport.
The hotel situation in Brussels was quite a story. First, we found a great hotel right in the middle of all of the sites we wanted to hit in our 23 hours. The room has an amazing view of the European streets and even had a balcony we could sit on in case Cat wore herself out in London. I even sent an email to the hotel to confirm the room we saw in the photos was the same room we were guaranteed. There was even plant wallpaper on one of the walls for Cat! 5 days before the trip SmartFlats cancelled our room. They tried to move us to another of their locations promising it was only 5 minutes walking from the original location. This was a lie. We checked the map and it was in fact 25 minutes walking from location to location. After fighting with the hotel and Hotels.com trying to make them do the right thing, we were able to cancel the room. This left us without a place to stay and only a few days to figure something out. We were torn between a 5 star hotel that was WAY out of our budget, or a small hotel called Residence Le Quinze that almost seemed too cheap and didn’t have very many photos of the room for us to make an informed decision. We figured we likely wouldn’t spend much time in the room anyway, and the view from this cheap hotel overlooked the Grand Place, so we took a chance. We’re so glad we did. The view was incredible! This photo above is taken from the window of our actual room!
Obligatory Belgium Waffle
Were we really going to go all the way to Brussels and NOT see the Mannekin Pis? Unfortunately he wasn’t clothed when we went, but it was still fun to see him in person. Truly the most underwhelming tourist attraction in Europe, but fun all the same!
Chocolate…so much chocolate.
Cat and I came up with this brilliant plan while we walked around the city. We would stop at each chocolate shop we passed and get one piece of chocolate each and compare them all. This was not a well thought out plan. There are 2 chocolate shops on each side of every street throughout the center of the city. It was too much chocolate. We didn’t make it past about 8 shops, and at 8 shops we were both regretting having made it that far. Here we are at what we both agreed was the best chocolate around; Elizabeth.
Cat grew up with The Adventures of Tinin. It was something that she shared with her Mom, and they both liked to read the various stories. We would find out that Brussels is cultural center for comic books in the world. In fact, Belgium has been making comics since 1920.
And right outside of the store was this huge Tintin mural! Comic murals are spread throughout the city, and there’s even a comic murals map on the official city website!
It was a much farther walk, but Cat also loves Asterix and Obelix. This mural was painted on a wall of a basketball court in a school playground. We couldn’t get into the playground since it was Sunday evening, but I was able to stick the camera through the rails and snap a photo.
Just walking through the streets we sort of accidentally found this shopping mall. We weren’t that interested in the shopping, but the architecture was amazing.
Did you know french fries aren’t actually from France? American GI’s in World War I heard people speaking French, which is 1 of 3 languages commonly spoken in Belgium, got some fried potatoes, loved it, called them French Fries. These are from Fritland, and both the fries and sauce were awesome.
Belgium is, of course, known for its beer.
Cat had tracked down a beer bar so we could really dive into the local beers. Moeder Lambic ended up being amazing. The bartender was super knowledgeable, asked about my beer preferences, and came up with 3 beers in a row that were the best beers I’ve ever had. All from the same Dupont Brewery, all out of this world. In fact, I’ve gone seeking things from the same brewery in Los Angeles, and while our selection is more limited, they’ve still been great.
The bartender even suggested a non-alcoholic beer for Cat to enjoy while she wrote postcards. And, the best part of all, was giving Cat barley for her test tube! We had been searching everywhere to find Belgian hops. When we got to Moeder Lambic the bartender set down a small bowl of barley for us to snack on, and immediately the light bulb went off – this would be perfect for Cat’s test tube! Confused, the girl behind the bar obliged, but didn’t know how to give us barley to take home. Cat, ever resourceful, produced a Ziploc from her purse. Next thing we know we were carrying home what felt like 3 pounds of barley!
We try to have traditional food when we visit new places. A quick Yelp search found something nearby. I don’t remember the name, and the food frankly wasn’t very memorable either. The wait was long, but they did have more beer on tap from the Dupont Brewery!
This is a brass sculpture affixed to the wall of one of the buildings right in the Grand Place. It’s said to bring luck if you touch or rub the statue. The history is rather sad, but if you want to know more of the story you can read the full history of the man and statue here.
Speaking of the Grand Place, I decided with it being late at night, and generally empty in the courtyard, to get some photos. Then it occurred to me that I could see our hotel window from below looking up. So, I posed Cat standing in the window and snapped some shots. See her way up there?
This photo might help.
The view out of the window is just incredible.
What a stroke of luck to have our original hotel cancel! Since neither of us could sleep we were able to get some great shots of the empty Grand Place at 4:30am local time.
On top of that view from our Window, the hotel came with a continental breakfast, served at a restaurant just across the courtyard in the Grand Place! The food was excellent, especially the bread, and it was just the right amount to get us started and ready for the long trip home.
And this is where things went sideways. Up to this point everything had gone so smoothly throughout the entire trip. We had a little trouble in London going to Brussels with airport security taking half of our toiletries, but overall things went pretty easy. Flights were on time, we were able to get to and do all of the things we had planned, and we discovered a bunch of stuff that we didn’t have planned along the way.
But our flights home were a mess! We left Brussels on time, but when we landed in Washington D.C., everything got screwed up. Our flight was overbooked and they were offering vouchers to people willing to take the flight an hour later. Tired, and wanting to get home, we decided to just stick with our original flight. That was our first mistake. The flight one hour later would end up leaving on time. We would end up stuck in the Washington D.C. airport for 8 hours. After they gave away our first delayed plane to a group heading to Paris, our second plane was malfunctioning. Finally, the third plane that arrived was coming from China, and this was the very beginning of what would become the Covid-19 pandemic. We didn’t realize then how severe the pandemic would become, but the airlines must have had a clue because it was almost an hour after the plane arrived that we would be able to finally board and head home.
All in all we had a great trip, and even though the flights coming back were screwed up, it didn’t ruin anything. We know it’s going to be a while before we can travel with Wesley, and even longer before we can go back to these 24 hour style trips, but it was nice to get in one last whirlwind trip to Europe.
Next adventure will be our baby boy!