Camping near Brugge

This blog post is not in chronological order.  I was checking through a few things and found this post was still in draft form and never published.  While we were traveling with limited wifi, this post got missed.  Since I think it is still worth mentioning, I am going to go ahead and publish it now.

 

We used a guide book that was several years old to find a campground near Brugge.  But once we finally found it, we could see that it was no longer in business.  It was nearly 7:00 and we were disappointed and hungry.  So we headed to a little grocery store.  We picked up some food for dinner and asked if there was any camping nearby.  Fortunately, they said there was camping in Sint Kruis, a suburb of Brugge!  Much relieved we headed out and found the campground about 10 minutes later.  Ahhh, life is good.  Camping Memling   was walking distance to historic Brugge!  They also had free showers, but you have to push the button every 30 seconds or so to keep the water running.  We were just happy they were free, and hot.   They had wifi available by buying a ticket for 1euro/hour and using the code on the ticket to access the wifi.  It was not fast wifi, but we did use it a couple times.  Adequate for emailing, but too slow for loading pictures onto our blog.  Also, there was a very nice grocery store only about 3-4 blocks away.

Some campgrounds have little convenience stores on site, but this one had a fresh bread vending machine.  Fresh bread was stocked once or twice a day.  We bought several loaves while we were there.  The bread was amazingly fresh and delicious.

As we walked to Brugge, we noticed a wooded area and some hanging ropes.  So we walked in to explore further.  It turned out to be a very unique playground. Mostly ropes and wood with a few tires and a few metal bars.  But no plastic.  There was even a place where ax handles were hanging down from a rope in a line.  You had to grab one handle then another to cross to the other side.  This play area required more strength, balance, and agility than the typical playground.  It was awesome!  And in such a beautiful setting.  We loved it.  Looking back, I wish I would have taken more pictures.

Many people bike and we were impressed to notice the nice bike lanes everywhere.  We also noticed that the cars looked out for the bikers.  We didn’t have bikes and we knew our camper would be difficult to park on the narrow streets of historic Brugge.  There is a bus that we could have taken, but we were up for the walk.  It was about 2 miles walk all the way into the main square of Brugge.  Great memories.  We ended up staying 3 nights and when we left, we all said that it would be great to go there again!