BOXES 196-197: Across Belgium and Northeastern France.

This is the town of Dinant, Belgium, on the Meuse River, with its ancient fortress towering above the church of Notre Dame de Dinant. Anne and I were there in January 1995, on a side trip from Brussels, where we were staying with Anne's brother Paul and his wife, Monique, and dining at their wonderful Thunderbird Café. I reported on our arrival in Amsterdam and exploration of Brussels in my previous post; in this one I'll show the slide photos I took (and recently digitally scanned) during several excursions from the Belgian capital.

The first of these excursions was over the border to northern France, where Anne and I especially wanted to see the cathedrals of Amiens and Rheims (or Reims if you prefer). A two-hour drive through Picardy, where we passed a number of huge World War I cemeteries, took us to Amiens Cathedral, built in the 1200s in High Gothic style during an unusually compact (for cathedral-building) 50-year period. Sadly, my slides give little sense of the magnificence of the church, inside or out; I'll include them for the 'historical' record, but you can look here to learn more about the church. It was difficult to get a full view of the west (front) facade because of trees or other buildings:

Here are a couple of closer views:

The cathedral is famous for its unusually high nave and soaring columns; the following photo gives some sense of this spaciousness:

A great deal of light comes through the high windows:

Some of the original stained glass remains, as well as some of the original painted interiors. There is also fine wood carving to be seen:

From Amiens our next stop was about 30 miles southeastward, at Noyon Cathedral, built in a much earlier style of Gothic in the 1100s:

And a few miles farther east was our third cathedral of the day, in Laon, with yet a different Gothic style, dating after Noyon but before Amiens. The town and its cathedral are built on a hill above a plain. In the photos below, note the boeufs (oxen or bulls, or possibly cows): 16 statues peering from the towers instead of gargoyles. It's unknown why the beasts were added to the towers' design: supposedly to commemorate either a miracle or just the animals' hard work in bringing the building materials up the hill.

My photos of the interiors are unfortunately soft-focused:

I see that I took a shot of a model of the town--it must have been on display in the cathedral--and later a shot of the parking lot outside the north facade of the church, looking toward the plain below. I hadn't intended these two pics to match up, but I now see that they do: you can see the tiny gate posts in the model and the real gate posts in the photo below it. I kind of like the latter photo for the woman by the car and the uniformed man by the gate:

We stayed overnight in Laon at a charming place called the Hôtel de la Bannière de France (I've found the brochure we'd kept). The next morning we noticed a pamphlet with a map suggesting an auto tour through nearby country roads: we followed the tour, though I later regretted that I didn't allow enough time to allow for visits to the champagne caves of Rheims, which Anne especially wanted to do.

We first saw the octagonal Chapel of the Templars from the 1100s, still in the town of Laon:

But I can't ID the chateau(x?) in the next photo, seen through trees with a pond in front:

We saw a number of ancient lavoirs: wash-houses or communal laundries from past centuries:

On a grander scale was the baroque Abbeye de Prémontré, now a psychiatric hospital (treating the more well-to-do, we imagined):

We also saw the handsome but relatively modest Gothic church of Saint-Julien de Royaucourt:

But there was nothing modest about the Cathedral of Rheims:

This was another truly astonishing place. Incidentally, I was able to photograph one of the rose windows in reasonably sharp focus:

Less sharp is a another shot of the window with more stained glass glowing above it. But I'm pleased with a photo of four statues outside the church (probably replicas of the originals now kept inside), with the famous 'smiling angel' on the left:

We drove back to Brussels after dark (in some sleet, as I recall), and spent the evening at a waterpark with big swimming pools, near the Atomium on the grounds of the 1958 Brussels World's Fair.

Another excursion took us to southeastern Belgium, with first a stop in the university town of Leuven, with its fantastic Flemish Gothic city hall:

Then it was on to Namur, on the Meuse River, and south to Dinant, shown at the top of this post. If you looked across the river from where I took that photo you would have seen the following:

Besides the riverside vistas my main memory from this part of our drive was my first taste of Hoegaarden's Grand Cru, with its slight orange-peel flavor, in a cafe in either Namur or Dinant. Afterwards we drove through a part of the Ardennes (an upland region with farms as well as forest) to Bouillon on the Semois River near the French border:

In the above photo on the left you can see Bouillon Castle, an ancient fortress. We drove up to it:

Here's a photo of Anne below the Castle:

By this time it was sunset, and we soon after drove back to Brussels:

yet another excursion, another overnighter (though just an hour and a half away), was to Aachen, Germany (Aix-la-Chapelle in French), where we wanted to see the Cathedral with all of its Charlemagne associations, and also to get a little taste of Germany (which Anne had never visited). I'm surprised to find that I took only one photo, of the City Hall:

But I remember the Cathedral, with its octagonal Palatine Chapel, as a haunting place, beautifully if dimly lit. And our 'taste of Germany' was literally a good veal or chicken dish with mushroom sauce and a Bitburger (in its straightforward German beeriness a total contrast with the astounding variety of Belgian beers). On the way back from Aachen we spent some time in Maastricht, the Netherlands--indeed, the highway between Brussels and Aachen went through this southeastern corner of the Dutch nation. I took a photo of a poster for Levi's 508 loose-fitting jeans that we'd seen all over Amsterdam the week before--we were struck by the fact that the ad would have been unimaginable in the US, especially from a major firm:

Carnival (Mardi Gras) is a big event in many Dutch and Belgian cities, and we saw some parade "clubs" practicing for the event, even in the rain:

Our final excursion, this one via train, was to Bruges, which I had visited during my first trip to Europe, in 1969 (see BOXES 28-30). Here you see part of the central Market Square:

And here is the Basilica (really more of a chapel) of the Holy Blood, with the City Hall to the right of it:

My other photos of Bruges that day show various haunting canals, stone bridges and houses of the medieval town:

My last photo from this 1995 trip is a kind of bookend to the first photo: I had taken one of Anne on an Amsterdam street, and now Anne took one of me in a similar location, before we took the train to the airport and home:

We were very happy to have found the bargain airfare that let us visit the Low Countries in the middle of winter--much milder than the typical weather back home--and spend time with Paul and Monique. My next post will cover a couple of short domestic trips we took in the summer of '95.