good could-live-there rating

Getting up at a quarter past four was remarkably easy considering the many factors attempting to prevent sleep; whilst the sound of snoring from Nicky's parents was barely noticeable, despite turning off the radiator and opening the window it was still far too warm and I was expecting to be woken up either by the heat itself or one of its consequences. Nothing else needed to be done apart from chuck a few bits of food into a bag for nibbling throughout the day (though I forgot the biscuits (which Nicky's dad is probably finishing off at this moment (as biscuits are usually hidden from him or made unpalateable by storage in a warm, non-airtight container (rather than in the fridge (where mine were))))), grab the stuff and wait for the taxi. Just in case anyone was looking at bag dimensions I took all camerabits out of the camerabag inside my small cabin-rucksack, replaced them in the rucksack in a shopping bag (padded with a hat and some handkerchiefs) and stuffed the folded camerabag into one of the larger hold luggage-rucksacks. Eventual outgoing hold-luggage masses were 11.6kg for Nicky and 13.8kg for me and we only had to vaguely wave our cabin baggage in the direction of the checker-in without it being subjected to a weighing. The girl before us in the queue had had £80 taken off her for exceeding the 15kg limit and someone was pulled aside between the departure lounge and aircraft for having too much stuff which they surely could have either noticed themselves or been warned about sooner.

The utter absence of detectable sarcasm in the Ryanair in-flight announcement offering "extra-special finest luxury hot chocolate" was impressive. Perhaps it was recorded under the pretence of being for another product in order to prevent the speaker from laughing. Nicky had one but didn't seem massively impressed. The "very fine luxury French roast fresh coffee" was barely above the level of the shite available from the departure area which was only just above the level of the crap served at Ikea, all of which were only drunk because there was no alternative at the time. Still, nice blue fluffy clouds beneath. Not much of a view on the way up to the cloud layer except a brief sweep across pre-dawn Ayr/Prestwick and some sort of rock thing out in the sea causing the waves to froth and glow. No sight of Ailsa Craig or any of the coastline to the south and we were on the wring side to be able to gawp at Arran.

"Whilst we operate an entirely non-smoking operation, Ryanair are proud to be the first airline to sell smokeless cigarettes, which come in three varieties." Proud? FFS. They were also proud to be able to announce when we were taxiing to the terminal building that the flight was nice and early and that they had the best record for early-landing flights of any blah blah, neglecting to make any mention of the appallingly crap landing where we landed so hard that we bounced and slewed distinctly sideways before wibbling straight. Still, you get what you pay for. The same went for the shuttlebus service to Brussels Central, featuring a driver who read texts, read something from a clipboard held in one hand, answered a phone call using a normal handset and then started yawning frequently whilst dodging from lane to lane.

Despite the distinct mankiness of the train station it was simple enough to get tickets for Bruges and find the correct platform and equally simple to creatively misinterpret the occasional "1" on the signs in the nearly-empty and very comfortable carriage we ended up in as meaning that it was the first carriage and not that our 2ème classe tickets were no good here. It took about an hour for an inspector to appear so the last few minutes in a still-better-than-back-home inferior carriage were no hardship.

I had unfortunately forgotten to pack my compass so had to resort to looking for church spire things and guessing when we got out of the station at Bruges. It was barely 1 and we'd said we'd arrive at the B&B at about three so went the slow way along a nice pedestrian/cycle track just the other side of the ring-canal rather than attempt to walk along pavements alongside bumbling codger-tourists whilst encumbered with sticky-out bags (including fully-expanded side pockets on my rucksack after a quick post-baggage-carousel re-pack to enable me to carry most of Nicky's stuff and a re-deployed large camera bag sticking out to my side). Even walking this out-of-the-way route there were a few nice squat tower-things to see and the visible bits of the centre of town looked most pleasant. As well as the frequent bicycles passing us on the path (and the huge rack of bikes outside the station) there were loads of bikes just leant against walls outside houses, not locked up and apparently under little threat of thievery. More of these were visible when we popped back out in the evening to find some food and potter about to get bearings. There are several locking-points around the place (mostly wheel-twisters, unfortunately) but they seem little-used in favour of the unsecured wall-leaning bike.

More opinion and findings of the B&B will follow after sampling of each but it's looking very promising. There was an actual-experience-based-looking list of restaurants, cafés and things of interest (including the key to the wifi I'm using now) rather than the usual collection-of-tourist-info-leaflets (which I like to augment (when I remember) with leaflets for attractions several hundred miles away from previous holidays), a small, fridge, an actual proper coffee percolator as well as teabags and so on and shelvesful of a load of secondhand-shop-looking dolls, mannequins, icons and various bits of crap. There are only two rooms in the place but a fair bit of effort appears to go into maintaining them. I had been worried that the second B of the B&B would involve having to interact socially with people at a table but apparently food will be left in a box outside the door in the morning. I shall go to sleep now to await it.