Birthday weekend in Oostende!

Friday afternoon we left early; Maggie had a friend cover her last class, and we pulled Duncan out of class in the early afternoon.  Oostende isn't that far away but on a nice weekend the traffic can be heavily congested, so we wanted to get there early.  It turned out that Malcolm was able to take a train from Antwerp, so he had no problem getting there in time.

The house is a newly renovated townhouse with five bedrooms, and enough accomodation for fourteen.  They also supplied a folding bed, and the Edwardses brought a travel crib for their youngest, so we were all settled.

Malcolm giving Kenzo instructions on how to properly pour trappist beer

setting up the place upon arrival

Not everyone in the party was able to leave as early as we did, so it was a bit of a nail-biter for everyone to get there.  Still it was good that I had made a huge quantity of tagliatele bolognese, and so pretty much everyone had a chance to quickly eat some before we made our way to the theatre.  We managed to make it just in time, and enjoyed a great concert with Ry Cooder and his fellow musicians.

I didn't take any pictures of the performance as they asked us not to, but it was really great.  The next day we spent on the beach.  Duncan went swimming, some people rented bikes, and we met up for lunch at a cafe.  The weather was gorgeous for mid October, with a high around 25 degrees.

In the evening we served the kids raclette, and then out came the birthday cake.  Jan's birthday was on Friday, and Maggie's on Sunday, so it was a shared cake...

Then the adults sat down to our raclette dinner, and did our best to tackle the large quantities of raclette cheese of different types, with pickles and pickled onions, and lots of potatoes, and charcuterie.  Everyone ate to their satisfaction and as far as I know no one experienced "the mistake"... this is what the Swiss call one raclette pull too many.  We made sure to avoid drinking water while eating raclette (which can result in a bolus of congealed cheese in the stomach; the dreaded "cheese baby") and instead enjoyed a nice roussette-de-savoie.

The next morning we got up pretty early and had a nice pancake breakfast courtesy of Claire and Jan.  Then it was time to get the place cleaned up, and we all hit the road to make it back home in time to vote.  Of course given the beautiful weekend weather, there was a ton of traffic, and a major accident, which backed up traffic for many kilometers.  We arrived at the polling station too late; they closed at 1:00 pm!  That's Belgium for you.  

The afternoon was gorgeous and so we sat outside in the garden for a bit.

The cats are adapting well to living in a musical house, as they were actually playing along to a Neil Young record last night...