Belguim- We stayed in Kortrijk and travelled the trenches of Ipres

Nicola's First Trench!!

German Trenches outside of Ipres 

British Trenches at Hill 62

Its more authentic with mud... quote of the day after getting pretty muddy walking through the trenches :) 

Stacks of Shell casings

View from the old Ipres church. Rebuilt after WWI after the entire town was bombed to the ground. the whole town was evacuated as the area formed a major battleground.
the tower is in the middle of the most amazing WWI museum we could imagine. you are given a chipped bracelet where you enter your details. from there, there are interactive areas throughout the museum which link to your location information and make the entire experience much more personal. you get stories of the wars history and personal stories of people of the time. we spent quite a few hours here exploring every part of this museum. 

There are so many war graves around Ipres that you couldn't drive for 5 minutes without passing one.this really brought together the magnitude of just how many people were lost during this war.  

The wall contains all of the names of the soldiers whose bodies were never recovered. there are also so may graves of unknown soldiers that it is sad to think of all of the families who never learnt what happened to the men they sent off to war.

Ghent Castle. Such a cute little town. we stopped here on the way from Kortrijk to Antwerpen.
We were going to Antwerpen to visit Meinou  on the way through to Linden.
Whilst we made it to Antwerpen, we weren't able to find Meinou :( The streets of the city were so confusing to drive through! so many one way streets! and we had no idea where we were going! we thought it couldn't be that hard and had taken screenshots from google maps but then there was a race of some sort and really we had no hope... after about an hour of driving around we called it a day and decided to just see Meinou in Linden... on the upside we got to see quite a lot of Antwerpen!

One of the many beer shops in Ghent

And around Ghent