Day 24 was excellent.  We started with a very nice breakfast in our hotel, the Marriott, in their breakfast room.  We had a latish check-out so we left our bags in our room and went out to have a look inside the Gravensteen, the castle.  It’s a fantastic castle. It has stood there for more than 833 years, having been built in 1180 by Philip of Alsace.  It was modelled on some crusader castles Philip had encountered in the Holy Land.  It underwent major restorations in the late 19thC, but most of it is still original and they faithfully kept to its original design. The battlements are particularly cool, with protruding crenellated bastions perched on top of arched buttresses at frequent intervals along the walls. It’s actually a very unusual design, making the castle quite unique. They had an absolutely brilliant collection of medieval weaponry inside the main hall, including a range of swords, crossbows and early guns, beautifully displayed.  The dungeon was suitably creepy, containing some blood-curdling instruments of torture. We had a good walk around the battlements, and up to the top of the keep. Very impressive!

We had a pleasant stroll back to the hotel past some nice shops and the canal, got packed up when we got there, and cabbed it back to the train station.  Our second train journey, to Antwerp, was excellent. We’d decided to pay the extra $10 or so for a first class ticket, and it was definitely the way to go.  We had the carriage virtually to ourselves. Antwerp was a very different kind of town to either Brugge or Ghent.  It is modern, big and busy, a very bustling, well-off looking place.  Brugge is much more historical, but busy and quite commercialised, while Ghent is very historical but quite quiet, without a lot of shopping areas.  We came out of the very grand Antwerp Station and you could tell right away this was a big city. It has a great wide open street mall winding right down through the centre called the Mier, lined with trees and grand looking buildings, and our hotel, the Hilton, was at the other end of it.  We cabbed it. We got lucky again with another upgrade (it pays to book early), getting this huge suite, with separate living room, two toilets, access to the terrace, just huge!  It was very nice.  

We went out for a look about town, walking first towards the old quarter, where the Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp’s Notre Dame you might say, stands.  On the way we saw the house where Anthony van Dyck, one of my favourite artists ever, lived as a boy. Arriving at the cathedral, we checked it out inside, and it’s pretty impressive. It’s relatively austere, as you’d expect in northern Europe, but still has a lot of amazingly valuable and significant paintings and sculptures throughout, including some great Rubens pieces. We had a wander in the streets around the old quarter.  It was really amazingly cold for June, felt like about 12 degrees. We stopped in for a waffle in a cafe in the cathedral square. There was a very good busker there playing a piano on large wheels, whose music filled the square. He was amazing! Later we walked down the Mier and went into a couple of very impressive looking malls.  On the way back to the hotel we picked up a half-bot of champas and some crackers to have in our great room, which had a view of the cathedral, before dinner.

Dinner that night was pizza in a great little place called Referendum Bistro, in the Groetmakt, I’m guessing ‘great square’, where they have the town hall, which is very impressive.  The pizza place was kind of an enclosed extension into the square, so you felt right in amongst it. There was a stupendous rain storm while we were in there munching and quaffing. It was a really enjoyable evening. By the time we were done the rain had mostly passed.  A very good day.

   The Gravensteen Castle   Antwerp Cathedral