The weather in Belgium was very thematic for Bulge historical site visits, but not so nice for some of the activities we were hoping to do. Matthew helped plan the Belgium portion of the trip, and his #1 priority was visiting the Plopsa Coo amusement park near Stavelot. We averaged about 2 inches of snow per day and experienced some severe whiteout conditions while driving from Bastogne to La Roche on our 2nd night. That wouldn't stop us from making the most of the amusement park, however.

Plopsa Coo is a clean, smallish amusement park not unlike the regional parks you'll see in the USA and as good as anything we have in the Pacific Northwest which is surprisingly devoid of thrill ride parks. It is geared toward smaller children but has a few rides to keep bigger kids interested.

Not that the kid rids kept Matthew away. We had to wait quite a while for the roller coaster and log flume to open up as they cleared snow and prepared the rides for safe use. Matthew stayed busy with the evil bunny ride, the slow cars that you can't actually steer, and good old fashioned playground rides with Jacob and Julie. The rest of us tried to stay warm.

We took a few rides on the roller coaster which was most enjoyable because of the snow and beautiful scenery - the ride itself was rather short and not terribly thrilling. The key is that Matthew had a blast and I earned some credits allowing me to spend more time visiting WWII sites.

After finishing at Plopsa around 1pm we made our way into Stavelot to visit the Abbey. The interesting parts of the abbey are surprising - there's a nice English language audio tour of the museum which goes into great detail on the local area history as well as the construction of the abbey. Things get really interesting in the basement where there is an automobile and motorcycle racing museum complete with Sony PS2 and PS3 kiosks that kept us entertained.

The ruins in front of the abbey made for a nice battlefield for a snowball fight for the boys. After visiting a few more Bulge sites we made our way back to La Roche for a bit of rest followed by our last evening meal in town.

We strolled around town looking for some interesting dinner options and ultimately made our way across the Ourthe to eat at La Brasserie Ardennaise. They had a fine selection of beer, wine, and local flavor dishes - highly recommended. Of course David and I had to order our standby favorite Trappistes Rochefort 10.

The picture below is from the bridge just in front of the restaurant with the feudal castle in the background.

This would be our last night in Belgium - next day we head to Reims, France but not without a few more stops in western Belgium.

Our first stop was the Castle of Bouillon near the French border. Fortunately we left our puppy behind, because apparently it is commonplace for the local raptors to fly away with the cuter ones.

Raptors at the castle? Yes indeed! One of the surprises at this outstanding castle was the birds of prey show put on by a local falconer. Even though the production was in French, the demonstrations of owls, hawks, eagles, condors, and falcons was first rate and kept us very entertained.

Our final stop in Belgium was the Orval Abbey, famous for its beer, cheese, and yellow stone ruins and new construction. The weather was spectacular and the boys had a great time playing some hide and seek in the ruins. I also had Matthew take a picture of our group to ensure that people would believe that I actually went on this trip.

We thoroughly enjoyed wandering the ruins for a while and finished our visit at the gift shop where I picked up a 4-pack of beer with an Orval glass.

That's it for Belgium, the highlight of our trip for me especially when you consider the Bulge / WWII sites we were able to visit. That will be the subject of my next few posts, followed by a wrap-up of our visit to Reims and Paris.

I'm going to break my Belgium report into two sections - tourism and Bulge military sites. This is the tourism section!

Our day started very early with a walk from our hotel in Bloomsbury to the St Pancras Eurostar station about 5 blocks away. I purchased the tickets for the six of us back in December and checking in was a breeze at the automated machine. After some breakfast we boarded the train and were on our way to Belgium.

Julie and Matthew kept themselves busy on the train with a few games of Solo Dice.

Our Eurostar ticket was good for a transfer in Brussels to any other Belgium station on a standard intra-Belgium train. Our next stop was Liege to pick up our rental car. We had to wait about 2 hours at the Brussels Midi train station before the transfer, giving me time to get some Euros at the ATM (long line - only one ATM in the station!). This was the same station where I took a train to Amsterdam two years ago.

I was a bit nervous coming to Liege:

• It was Easter Sunday and I knew that many of the rental car stations in the country were closed for the holiday. I had a reservation and was assured online that the station would be open, but still...
• Julie and I had to cab it across town to get the car, then come back to the train station and pick up the rest of the crew

Turns out I had nothing to worry about - the office was open (clearly just for us - I'm certain they were shutting down as soon as we arrived). Unfortunately their one and only nav system was stolen so were going to have to navigate the old fashioned way with a map and navigator. The hardest nav we had was getting back to the train station from the rental office.

We made our way down the German border then cut across to our destination in La Roche en Ardennes. You'll learn more about the drive down when I go into depth on our historical Battle of the Bulge site visits.

Our hotel in La Roche was Le Luxembourg, a quaint hotel / B&B with a fabulous staff. Dinner at the hotel is mandatory on weekends and holidays so we were obliged to join the chef (also the owner) in the dining room. No complaints - the five course meal was fabulous and it was relaxing to just hang out in the hotel after a long day of traveling. Jacob was clearly recovering by dinner time, enjoying his broccoli soup and showing some better spirits.

Our first stop on Monday morning were the Grottes de Hotton, a spectacular cave system with a fine tourism center and guide service. Our tour guide was able to simultaneously conduct the tour in Dutch, French, and English.

The snow was falling steadily by the time we entered the caves, making this a nice retreat from some blustery weather outside. I was very impressed by how deep and extensive the caverns were - not on par with Mammoth or Carlsbad caverns, but dramatic nonetheless.

From Hotton we turned south to explore Luxembourg, getting a great tip in Diekirch to visit the castle in Vianden. We had only planned to visit Clervaux but this was a fortunate turn as Vianden was by far the better choice. The castle sits dramatically perched over the city and valley and offered amazing views from below and above.

We made a brief stop in Clervaux to admire the town and castle there, but there wasn't much to see. It would be worth a visit in the future to see the photography exhibit there, but for those thinking of visiting the area you can stick to Vianden for your castle experience.

We ended our day with a light dinner at the Viking, the restaurant next door to our hotel owned by the same family. The food selection was limited, but the beer selection superb.

Dave and I both agreed on our new favorite beer - Rochefort 10. Fortunately it is available here in Portland at Whole Foods, but cost is a daunting $6-$7 per bottle. A nice luxury to have from time to time.

Speaking of our host, here's a shot of the proprietor and chef from La Roche en Ardennes. I think he likes to come over to the Viking to party after he finishes serving his dinner guests at the hotel.

It should be easier than this. I thought I had a decent Rails installation running on my MacBook Pro but TextMate was giving me some grief when shelling out to execute certain commands (like pulling down the schema for a model).

This worried me - my environment seemed OK, but if TextMate was failing then there's likely some other lurking problem. It took me about 2 hours to unwind everything and get my environment working so that I could see this.

The root cause? I'm not 100% sure, but here are a few hypothesis:

• I had a mixed MacPorts and Leopard install of Ruby and Rails
• I likely had some path issue that I cleaned up, causing gems to not be found like they should
• I had some strange mixtures of legacy and new ports installed that needed some serious work to clean up.

I think the concept of MacPorts is good, but in reality it shouldn't be this hard. My experience with apt-get on Ubuntu was about 100% better.

Oh well, all is good now. I absolutely love the new TextMate Rails 2 bundle.

Some quick thoughts on two games I got to play tonight - Notre Dame (finally!) and Hanging Gardens.

KC, Rita, Ian, Mike and I first played a five player game of Notre Dame, a game I "won" in a secret Santa trade last December but hadn't managed to play yet. I had heard mixed but mostly positive reviews on the game as well as varying reports on play length. We played in a little over an hour after learning and I quite like it. There seem to be multiple paths to victory and enough competition / interaction to keep you on your toes. Balancing the rat and plague problem was a quandary - I think sometimes you just have to take your medicine. The cycling of the cards ensures that you'll have a wide range of options so you can actually strategize a bit, though the timing can interfere with those plans. I think this is a 7-8 rating for me, especially if I can play it in 45 minutes with 3 players.

Hanging Gardens is an interesting puzzle and set collection game where you draft cards with symbols that overlay on your garden. The goal is to get contiguous orthogonal sets of like symbols together that then allow you to claim the tiles you are collecting. Very easy to learn and decent fun, but I have a problem with how many tiles were left at the end of the game when the cards were exhausted. This makes planning very difficult as there are limited sets and for some (like the tiles where there are only 4), the odds seem pretty good that you will only see 2 of the 4 in the game. Not a bad game, but there plenty of other games of this weight that I would play ahead of it.

Day 3 (Saturday) was our last full day in London, and the weather started to turn cold and windy. This would be the trend for the next 5 days or so in the UK and western Europe, with a high likelihood of snow in many of those parts. After a quick pastry breakfast and coffee near our Underground stop, we headed down to the Tower of London to explore the castle and take advantage of the free Yeoman / Beefeater tour.

We arrived early as planned and walked onto the grounds before the crowds started building up (remember, this was the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter) and proceeded directly to the crown jewels. This was probably a good idea as we saw how long the lines must get there when crowded - it was nice to be able to zoom through the switchbacks and get right to the good stuff. Some big diamonds in there, but more impressive was the vast collection of medieval weaponry and armor.

Unfortunately Jacob started turning ill that morning and as the time came to depart for our Beatles walking tour, Julie and Jacob opted to stay behind and explore the torture exhibits a bit more then return to our hotel room.
Dave, Lisa, Matthew and I then raced across town to try and join the London Walks - Beatles In My Life Walk with guide Richard Porter. I've done London Walks twice - once in 1990 as a pub crawl, and now in 2008, and I highly recommend them for the value and experience. We were very fortunate as we arrived at the station 15 minutes late but caught the group just as they were leaving.

We saw a number of great sites, though none were visually recognizable to me other than the final stop at Abbey Road Studios. Of course I took the obligatory photograph. Matthew decided to keep his shoes on.

Our final touring destination of the day was to walk in the Westminster, Buckingham Palace, and Whitehall area to take in some of the famous buildings and pound the pavement a bit.

The weather was getting very blustery by now so on the Whitehall portion of the walk we stopped into a book store with a nice coffee cafe inside and had some giant cappuccinos and hot chocolates along with a much needed foot rest.

We left Jacob in the room for our dinner Saturday evening with Mikael Sheik (of SpielByWeb fame) and his wife Phyllis. We opted once again for Indian food close to home in Bloomsbury. While the food wasn't as good as the night before, the company was outstanding and we enjoyed catching up and learning more about living in London.

We retired early Saturday night to pack and prepare for our early morning Eurostar ride into Belgium.

We are in Seaside, Oregon at the Oregon Scholastic Chess Federation state tournament. The boys are each tied for 1st place after 4 rounds in their respective intermediate divisions. You can follow my photostream to see pictures I'm uploading from the iPhone.

Update: The boys each won their divisions in the state championship!

Where can you get a cup of coffee at 6am in London? I set out to answer that question on Friday morning after waking up bright and bushy tailed at 5am (8 hours of sleep - woot!). I thought the quick stop joints near the Russell Square Underground would be a sure bet (Pret a Manger, local breakfast spot, etc.) but alas nothing seems to open until 7am. I had nothing better to do than roam and explore so I worked my way outward from the hotel in concentric circles until I happened upon a young adult tour group loading on a bus at one of the large budget hotels near our Holiday Inn. The hotel opened their coffee cafe to service these tourists as they checked out and loaded on the bus, so I slid in line and got my well earned coffee. I sat down in the cafe, which proceeded to close shop as the tour bus departed. I suppose I should consider myself lucky. I wonder if Starbucks in London is open at 6am?

After returning to the room about 7am to wake up Julie and the boys, we headed to the lobby for a rendezvous with Iain Cheyne and his lovely family for a breakfast date. The goal was to find a good old English breakfast with eggs, bacon, sausage, tomatoes, and beans. I continue to be amazed with how adventurous the boys are an they ordered right off the menu and went for the whole shebang.

Iain is one of those people that I feel like I know and relate to extremely well, but we've had about 90 minutes total of face time in our lifetimes. I believe we met briefly at Essen in 2006 but never found time to sit down and play a game together, so it was nice to finally sit down, meet the family (that's Oscar you see in the background), and talk about life, work, travel, and more.

Jacob owned the planning for Friday and he set us off across the Thames to visit the Imperial War Museum, my all-time favorite museum in the world. Seriously.

This museum has a great gallery with a wide range of aircraft, tanks, SP guns, half-tracks, and more - everything is pretty much from the 20th century with a sharp focus on WWI and WWII. While fun to look at and explore, the static displays are not where it is at in this museum.

There are three areas you must explore in this museum. The WWI exhibit features a chronological history of the conflict with great artifacts, photos, and video to guide. There is also the dated but still interesting trench experience (check out the Flickr photo set for more photos of these exhibits). The UK's level of commitment and sacrifice in these two wars was on a different plane than the US and I particularly enjoy the English flavor and perspective - war posters, ration signs, newspaper stories, and news film.

The WWII exhibit is the best I've seen anywhere - in fact, where in the US can you find a museum exhibit that covers the conflict from soup-to-nuts across all armed forces? I haven't seen such a thing and would love pointers from readers to museums I've missed, as everything I've seen has been service-focused (Air Force museum, Army division museums, etc.). Similar to the trench experience, you can find the London blitz experience in this area. It seemed more interesting in 1990 when I first visited the museum.

Finally, the Holocaust exhibit in the Imperial War Museum is the best I've seen anywhere. This exhibit does not pull punches and is not for smaller kids or the faint of heart, but I felt it was important for both boys to see the photos, hear the survivor narratives, and understand as much as any of us can the human tragedy experienced by so many.

Needless to say, I probably could have spent the whole day (or even two) at the museum, but Jacob was our tour director and it was time to move on around 1:30pm. The weather was chilly but clearing up when we left the museum to have lunch at the Crown & Cushion pub nearby.

We were at least 2-3 hours behind schedule by the time we finished lunch and Jacob decided to forgo visiting the operating theater museum so that we could make sure we got on the London Eye while the weather was good. The lines looked intimidating at first (this was Good Friday so holiday activity from locals and tourists was quite high) but we moved through the ticket purchase and Eye line faster than expected, about 30 minutes.

Just as we crossed the pathway in line to the covered area before boarding the Eye, the storms came in like a hammer - lightning, high winds, and a healthy dose of hail set many folks in line to their umbrellas or even running away from the line. They shut down the Eye for a while until the lightning subsided (we were thankful or that), so by the time we took our turn we had an amazing spectrum of light and color or our ride. This was a good choice for early in the trip as it gave everyone a better understanding of the topology and city layout. I know it is somewhat of a tourist trap, but I think the Eye is a great choice for first-time London visitors (similar to climbing the Eiffel Tower in Paris - more on that later).

The weather held up after leaving the Eye so we walked across the Jubilee bridge to watch the peddlers selling nicknacks and admire the city skyline as the sun set. Matthew continued to demonstrate his ability to sleep in just about any position or situation.

Before the war museum we had picked up some discount tickets for Spamalot (even at a discount I think the cost for the four of us was something like $220-$240), the show voted most likely to please the widest range of our travel group. We even watched the Holy Grail a day or two before leaving to brush up on our ability to quote Monty Python lines at will. We needed food before the late show and found a nice Indian restaurant in the theater district, but unfortunately it took too long to seat and serve us. We literally had to ask for the check as the entrees were delivered and race out of the restaurant gobbling naan as we walked to the theater. Typical rude American tourists I guess.

The show was great fun or everyone - enough memorable lines and scenes ("bring out your dead", "how do you know he's the king?", etc.) to provide a connection to the movie but some great songs and theater added to keep you interested.

We had hoped for some more pub activity after the show, but Good Friday meant our local joints were closing early so we ended up retiring around 11pm, eager to sleep and start our final full day in London.

Time to start the steady flow of photo-journal posts for our Europe trip! I'll break this into a day-by-day journal and will include plenty of photos. If you are a (war)gamer, you'll probably enjoy my recap of the Ardennes the most.

This is a trip we had been planning since late summer of 2007. It started as a trip for just the four of us, but at a family wedding in November we added Julie's brother David and his wife Lisa to the group. The exchange rate was poor in the fall, but we had no idea just how bad it would get by spring, particularly the Euro. Fortunately we paid up front for our two longest hotel stays, locking in our biggest expenses at about 1.35:1 which saved us about 15-20%.

One goal for the trip was to have a healthy mix of big city and countryside, another was to get significant time in the Ardennes to explore Battle of the Bulge sites. London and Paris made perfect bracket cities for the Ardennes. We also wanted to travel as light as possibly, limiting luggage to carry-on backpacks to ensure mobility and align with our rapid-pace itinerary. We used a number of online resources to help as maximize effectiveness while minimizing space, including Travelite, Onebag, and Tim Ferriss.

Let me give a quick refresher on the overall itinerary:

• Wednesday, Mar 19 - depart from PDX and OKC
• Thursday, Mar 20 - Sunday, Mar 23 - London
• Sunday, Mar 23 - Eurostar train to Brussels, in-country train to Liege, drive to La Roche en Ardennes
• Sunday, Mar 23 - Wed, Mar 26 - La Roche en Ardennes, Belgium
• Wed, Mar 23 - Thu, Mar 24 - Reims, France
• Thursday, Mar 24 - Monday, Mar 31 - Paris, France
• Monday, Mar 31 - return home

David and Lisa timed their arrival at Gatwick to be about the same as ours (they originated in Oklahoma City). We were supposed to arrive 90 minutes after them on Thursday, March 20 but we made exceptional time and landed within 5 minutes of each other. Unfortunately our passport control line took 45 minutes to get through, but we were still on the Gatwick Express train to Victoria by 9:30am and arrived in London by shortly after 10:00.

Our first step at Victoria was to buy London Underground passes for all of us. I wasted some time standing in line at the automated machines before I realized that I wouldn't be able to buy the kids' tickets there, so re-directed myself to the assisted line to take care of business. We purchased 3-day passes for the adults and 3 1-day passes for Jacob and Matthew. These passes turned out to be somewhat unreliable, with some of cards stopping to work early in the process. Wasn't a big deal as we just flashed them to an assistant at each entry/exit to gain passage.

Next we walked to our hotel, the Holiday Inn Bloomsbury, and managed to check in early. The hotel was fantastic and a decent bargain, especially for us trying fit four people into one room. I would have preferred to stay in a B&B and get more local flavor, but there just aren't good options for a family of four as just about everywhere we looked would have forced us to get 2 rooms. Holiday Inn and Best Western were great choices for finding hotels - easy to use web sites, trustworthy quotes and booking, and in the end we were very happy with the quality.

I wanted to start the day with a city orientation including a city bus tour. We hopped on the Underground at Russell Square and went to Leicester Square to then walk to Trafalgar Square. The weather was interesting and surprisingly similar to Portland - windy, chilly (40s), with sporadic rainfall. As we walked to Trafalgar we stopped in the National Portrait Gallery and checked out the Tudor paintings among others. We should have just spent the next hour and toured the National Gallery, but instead got on a bus from Trafalgar to the Tower of London. Unfortunately the mid-day traffic was horrendous, even in the bus express lanes, dragging out the trip. While it was nice to be inside during the ensuing downpour, this only added to the disappointment as the inside windows became very fogged up. It was a good chance for Matthew, Dave, and I to catch up on some sleep though.

We aborted the bus tour at the Tower and got back on the Underground to head back to our home turf and visit the British Museum, which has changed significantly since my last visit in 1990. The interior covered courtyard is nothing short of amazing. We focused on the permanent exhibits, paying special attention to the ancient Egyption, Persian, and Greek antiquities. The boys held up reasonably well - it was very important for us to manage our time in the art and history museums to keep the boys engaged.

We left the museum by around 5 or 5:30pm - way ahead of my original schedule as I knew it would be open late that Thursday night and had hoped to work a bit later into the evening before we cut for dinner. Those of you that have traveled east-bound to Europe on a red-eye know how critical it is to stay up to a decent evening hour before retiring.

Our solution - spend plenty of time at two pubs and milk out another 2-3 hours eating pub food and sampling beers. We started at the Marquis of Cornwallis pub directly across the street from our hotel. The food was good enough and the beer exceptional. In hindsight I think the boys enjoyed London over Paris because of the pub scene - they are plentiful, laid back, don't mind if you just hang around and drink beer, and obviously very social.

Next up was Lord John Russell, a fine pub but a bit smaller and hence more crowded. We lasted there until about 8pm then walked back to the hotel to crash.

I stumbled on Last.fm via the nice MacHeist app CoverSutra. You can find my profile here.