After a slightly less cold night in the van we got up and had our first shower of the trip, it felt amazing,  after suitable amounts of tea had been drunk we chipped off into town to see some sights and stop by lidls for some breakfast. We forgot it was Sunday and lidls was closed, no breakfast then.

First stop on our adventure was a brewery tour, the brewery is called the half moon or De Halve Maan if you are a local.  From outside the brewery look like any other old building but when you get inside you begin to realise it’s really quite a complex place.

At one time there were 300 brewery’s in Bruges and now there is only one, what’s nice about this one is they have kept mostly all of the old brewing equipment so you get an idea of old vs modern techniques, you also end up on the roof of the brewery looking out across Bruges. At the end of the tour you get a free beer, a blonde called the fool of Bruges, it’s really quite nice and easy to drink.

They’ve turned the old filling hall into a brasserie, the food looked amazing, all that remains of the past here was an old filling machine.

Stop two of the day was the chocolate museum, on arrival you pay your money for the tour and are given a bar of chocolate and invited to help yourself to some giant chocolate buttons, great start!

As you walk in the first thing you are greeted with is an epic chocolate fountain.

You then spend the next hour or so walking between floors learning about the Mayan origins of chocolate, how it fell in and out of fashion over the years and how it was mainly served as a drink before being sold in the form we’re most familiar with today. At the end of the tour there is a quick demonstration of how they make their praline chocolates and you get to eat one of those too. The museum was interesting but we both agreed there was way too much reading to do.

We’d had a late start to the day so by the time we got out of the museum and with nothing in our stomachs other than a cheeky chocolate waffle our thoughts turned to food. Our options led us to a little place that’s more like a museum than a restaurant, it was shut and not opening for 20 mins so we headed over the road to another little place for a drink.

We grabbed a drink and then noticed how they cooked the food here.

All the tables were reserved bar one, a table for two, we abandoned the other restaurant and settled in for some fire cooked grub.

Our table was as close to the fire as we could be!

There is a 3 course meat or fish menu you can have with or without beer for each course, we had one of each with beer!

The food was exceptional, in my opinion the best food we’d had so far and about 100 euros for the two of us..

The only downside to this beer with every meal idea is you end up getting smashed, even more when the couple you are chatting to buy a round, you buy them a round and then the owner buys everyone a round, we were deffo a little on the wobbly side…

For the third night running I have no real memory of the ride home, lolly got us back safely as she always does, we went to bed with full stomachs and fuzzy heads…