We had a decision to make, our plan was to visit Dinant which was about an hour from our newly formed town at Benelux Campground. Last night it was pretty noisy until about midnight. Nothing malicious or rowdy, just a lot of people moving around and having conversations. About 1 am everyone finally went to sleep and stopped using their devices and ours all woke and started sending us alerts about all of the stuff that happened while we had no bandwidth. But by the time we were moving around about 8am the network had been overwhelmed again and we had no wifi. We decided we were going to move on.
It was about an hour drive on pretty good roads to Dinant and we went to investigate the campground I had found on line. We were a little concerned about availability based on our experience yesterday but when we pulled up there were only 3 other RV’s parked on a meadow. There didn’t appear to be anyone in charge but fortunately one of the RV’s had UK plates so I went over asked him what the deal was. He said park up where you like and someone will come by in the evening and collect the money.
Since it appeared empty we drove on down into town and to my surprise found a good place to park with no real effort. Dinant has been fought over many times and was the site of a major battle in WWI between the French and the Germans. Charles de Gaulle then a Lieutenant was wounded here. After Dinant was captured by the Germans they executed 674 of the towns inhabitants for being partisans.
The city is confined to two narrow banks along the Meuse river. It is a really spectacular site with the bluffs on each side of the river dominating the town. A lot of the buildings are made from the same granite that forms the cliffs above the town so the town seems to blend into the hillside.
Dinant is also the birthplace of Adolphe Sax who was born here and lived here until the ripe old age of 6 months. Nevertheless Dinant claims him and plays up his invention of the saxophone which he did in Paris. Everywhere you look in town are statues of saxophones, and it is the host of a prestigious competition for young saxophonists every year.
It is also the home of Leffe brewery which is one of the biggest brewers in Belgium. The brewery itself is impressive and looks down on the city from on top of one of the bluffs.
After walking around for an hour or so we decided we would give a Leffe a try and have a proper lunch. After a thorough examination of the restaurants of Dinant we picked one that was located along the waterfront. We sat down but could not get the waiters attention. After sitting at a dirty table for about 20 minutes we finally got someone to bring us a menu, we didn’t want to lose him so we placed our order while he was still there. He took our order but didn’t clean the dirty plates off the table. About 10 minutes later he came by and cleaned the plates but didn’t wipe the table, and more importantly did not deliver our beer. Another 15 minutes went by and we managed to snare another waiter and asked for our beers to be delivered, and to check on our order. After another 15 minutes went by without our beers, never mind any food we were pretty annoyed. Meanwhile tables that arrived well after us had their beer and their food. So we did something we have never done in our lives. We got up and walked out of a restaurant. Down the street we found a nice kebab place that served us in about 10 minutes with a smile and delivered another huge plate of fries with our kebab.
We headed back to the campground and found that the population of the campground had grown to about 6 campers. By the end of the day there are about 20 here, but it is still pretty laid back compared to yesterday.
Our foray into the Ardennes has been a bit of a disappointment. Everything seems a bit overwhelmed and chaotic, not at all what we expected when we decided to come here. Ton commented that we are going to have to pay more attention to the holiday schedules of countries we visit in the future.
