Kortrijk
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21/09/18 – After a pleasant trip down through its locks, we arrived in Kortrijk and found a mooring fairly easily just a 10 minute walk from the centre. Not a bad place to stay, but because it was windy and the pontoon we roped to was a floating one, it was very creaky and noisy – Milly was not a happy girl with all that noise! Despite that, there was one especially good thing about the mooring – it seemed to be free, and that included water and electric. In reality you did have to pay (8E/night at a machine on the roadside) but there was no policing of the pontoon so we hoped to have a few free days.
Once sorted out, we all went off for a quick look round – Kortrijk seems to be a nice, well cared-for town, and until mid-November had a PLAY expo going on that Nicki decided would be worth looking at. At first glance it seemed to be a series of events/exhibitions dotted around the town, but at the second stop we agreed that it was probably aimed more at children ….. one was to hold a pose for one minute as per a diagram – holding a trainer on your head for a minute, lying on the ground on a set of tennis balls, a stiletto shoe with drawing pins stuck in it (to express the pain that women go through when wearing stilettos). Nicki enjoyed herself though, and loved the ‘confetti’ room in particular (supposed to be a room full of confetti weighing the same as the person who ‘designed’ it) and you could go in and leap around, throw the confetti around, lie in it … whatever you wanted.
We had expected a pretty noisy night because of the wind, but it died down over the evening, and it turned out to be uneventful (thankfully), although a commercial did wake us around 5.30am for a brief time.
Saturday, we tried to find a small market that we’d been told was on, but it turned out not to be, so we just strolled around the town; the town was really nicely laid out with lots of green spaces (unusual for most of the Belgium that we’ve visited so far) and a large shopping mall (much like any other mall really). We had left the dogs back on the boat this time, so we were able to use them as an excuse to go back when we got really tired. Plus it began to rain.
Sunday was a rubbish day – rain, rain and more rain. We did get the fun of walking the dogs in pouring rain though, so all was not lost! And they loved it.
We had already decided that today would be an indoor-day due to the weather forecast, so we just did a few jobs around the boat and generally tidied up.
