Paris to Belgium

Next stop: Brussels(!). We made the now-familiar trip into town to pick up our rental car early on in the day and then braved the drive through Paris rush hour back to pack all our gear up. Lesson: if it says the car fits seven people, it means just seven people. Disregard what they say about it fitting three bags because that is false false false. It was a rather cosy trip with all of our bags plus pushchair plus Hisham’s family’s luggage but other than that the car we got was excellent. It had an inbuilt GPS, cruise control, automatic windscreen wipers and a fully adjustable driver’s seat. I at least was comfortable!

Pros at using the escalators with a pushchair

Waiting forever for the gates to open. People regularly tried to sneak through with us.

Paris morning rush hour. Luckily we didn't need to go through them!

Adam was a big fan of the toy cars in the Sixt office

The Beast

Before we figured out how to turn the navigation system to English

A note on renting vehicles in Europe: having done so a grand total of two times now, I feel qualified to dispense some wisdom regarding navigation systems. We knew we absolutely needed a GPS so we made a point of indicating our preference for it this time in our online booking. There was an option to pay something like €12 per day to guarantee that you would have one but that would have cost us about $100 so we decided to wing it and hope the booking agents were nice when we turned up. When we arrived at the Sixt office there was a guy organising our car and a lady manning the other desk who didn't look like she was happy with the world that day. She had a name tag with a name I had never seen before so I asked her about the pronunciation and meaning of it. I've forgotten what it was now but I remember the pronunciation was beautiful and her name meant freedom, but that's beside the point. The point is that she brightened up after this conversation and we also discovered she spoke Arabic. As I was answering questions for the guy, Hisham chatted to her a bit. He sneakily asked her about the GPS in Arabic and she told him not to mention it - that it would be part of the car. So we didn't, and lo and behold it was indeed part of the car of awesome when we arrived. Moral of the long-winded-story: most rental cars now are new and have inbuilt GPS. Don't waste money requesting one or get scammed into it by the booking agents.

As we were leaving Paris we came across an exhilarating sight which looked something like this:

but if you can imagine a plane twice this size ahead of us then you have more of an idea of what it was like. A very very cool experience to add a little excitement to our trip.

About two hours into the trip we were nearing the outskirts of Brussels when all of a sudden I noticed the rain had stopped falling like it usually does and it had started kind of floating. You could say it was drifting down in a relaxed, gentle, snowy sort of a way. It didn’t last for more than a minute or so and it wasn’t staying on the ground and we didn’t stop the car but it was magical none-the-less. Snow! This is what a winter trip to Europe is all about I reckon. I was driving so you have been spared any blurry boring photos I would have otherwise taken – lucky you. I’m hopeful that we’ll see more snow soon though so be prepared.

The Airbnb apartment we booked in Brussels was furnished in a very eclectic way with record players and Japanese art scattered about. The pots and plates were deliberately mismatched and there was no microwave or even a toaster. It was certainly a different style of living to what we had experienced in Paris and not really one I like so much but it was warm and spacious and it had six beds so we were happy. It also had a cat, which Adam and I both really enjoyed. I didn’t realise how much I’ve missed having cats around. We had planned to go out and explore the town in the evening but it was so cold and dark that instead we celebrated our arrival with Tim Tam Slams and then headed to an early bed.