Long weekend

Well it has been a pretty boring week. We havent done a whole lot besides going out for dinners with Daves coworkers. I did a lot of reading, knitting, and biking. It was doing a lot of raining this week. I am hoping this week is a bit better.

but this past weekend was a long weekend- the national day in Belgium - so we did a lot.

On Saturday ---we slept in a bit and headed out to go Geocaching :

Geocaching is an outdoor treasure-hunting game in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called "geocaches" or "caches") anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small waterproof container containing a logbook and "treasure," usually toys or trinkets of little value. Today, well over 800,000 geocaches are registered on various websites devoted to the pastime. Geocaches are currently placed in over 100 countries around the world and on all seven continents, including Antarctica.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching

we went with Thomas since he goes geocaching often. The first one had us going into Mons to a local park. After about 10 minutes of searching I spotted a black film canister in a tree. It was a "micro-cache- and contained a list for you to write your name down on.

We headed out to the next cache, stopping for lunch at a local Italian restaurant. we all ordered pizzas. I tried a spaghetti pizza. It was the crust, sauce and cheese cooked and then taken out and then spaghetti tossed on top! It was actually pretty good! At the restaurant we noticed on the GPS that we were in France. We did not expect that at all!

The next cache was located in a national park. It had us climb a mountain which I think was left over shale from mining. We walked around it and then the path went away from it so we thought we better go up. We climbed up to the top of the mountain. It was quite a steep hike and when we got to the top we of course saw the path on the other side. The instructions were in French and when translated it said to find a circle in the topography (which we did) and also find a house with its number on its roof (1878)

down to the circle and then we think the translation didnt work out. Said to stand in the middle and then go 18 feet to the 110 degrees. We walked all around the circle and looked everywhere to see if we could find the cache. We looked for a long time and never did see it. So home we went and stopped at a McDonalds where we did see beer on the menu. We then went home and to bed after watching a movie on Daves computer.

Sunday----- we got up early and headed out to the Efteling. We were at the park from 10:45- 9:00 Its a fairy tale theme park in the Netherlands. We met my moms cousins Marijke(from our last trip to Amsterdam), Adri, his fiancee Ivy and her 2 kids. We had a great time all day looking at animitronic fairy tales brought to life, and going on rides. The fairy tales seem to be mostly Grimm Fairy tales. Many which Canadians will not know. We all headed out to the closest town and had dinner at a Chinese place. It was a great day enjoying all the sights and sounds.

Monday--- again we did get to sleep in. When we got up we headed to the train station and headed to Brussels. Thomas and his wife met us there for the celebrations. It was the National holiday day and there was a lot of celebration of national defense. We couldn't see the parade since it was so packed so we went off and found a few local atractions. We found the Mannequin Pis and the Jeanneke Pis. they are statues that are peeing. Obviously its a boy and a girl that are separated by the square.
We went to the main park and then off for dinner. The mussels are very popular right now so dave had fried mussels, and I had Stoemp. It was a potato, carrot and pea mashed with sausage.

We went for a waffles for desert but they were so busy and ran out so I had a crepe but it wasnt very good.

Now today is a good day to relax.
Im going to upload photos a bit later.