Sometimes the only way out is through

Tuesday was a national holiday here in Belgium. Belgian National Day to be exact. My very Flemish, EU, then Belgian (his ranking, not mine) colleague Luc gave me a brief history of what is celebrated on 21 July. I’ll save that for another time.

But nothing says ‘get on a train and explore’ like a random Tuesday off of work. So a friend and I hopped on a train to Dinant, Belgium and set off on a 3-hour hike/walk/adventure extraordinaire. It started with a bit of a climb through the village of Dinat and then crossed into some back roads, where we were attacked by a mad flock of birds….which turned out only to be a spontaneous rain burst.

After cutting through someone’s backyard, we found ourselves smack dab in the middle of the most gorgeous countryside strolling through corn fields, fields of golden wheat, and even a field of turnips (we think!). We said hello to some friendly cows and thanked them for their cheap milk (sorry protesting farmers) and then found ourselves at a fork in the road. One path led us straight into the home of a very growly dog, so we turned back. The other path led us to a very boring highway…so we created our own route forward. The intelligence of such a decision can be debated later, but we went off-roading into the forest, a bit over-confident in our ability to find a way out.

We cruised along for a good little bit until the path was covered by heaps of bramble. We had two choices: go back to the fork in the road and take the boring highway path. Or create a new path forward, which entailed a rather steep descent to the edge of a wooded ravine leading to, literally, God knows where. Guess what we decided to do?

We started down the descent. About halfway down, we paused to wipe the sweat from our brow and probably to acknowledge the fact that while we were slowly going down, we still had no plan for the wooded ravine that awaited. ‘Worse case, I suppose we can go down into ravine on our bottoms, right?’ Sounded better than climbing back up, so we carried on.

We made it to the bottom, and then weaved our way through the dense woods and down the little ravine...then hopped a fence and found ourselves in a sheep pasture. Hopped another fence and landed on a road leading to…..Leffe! Yep, walked right by the monastery where this famous Belgian brew began. From there it was smooth sailing back into Dinant, where we collapsed at the top of the citadel, escaped some crazy pirate people, picnicked and then boarded the ‘torture chamber’ back to Brussels (we were already hot & sweaty…and the train back did nothing to ease our suffering…though the cans of Jupiler helped).

What a day! Once home, I collapsed on my sofa only to be awakened by the sound of fireworks over the the Palace. Crawled to my bed, remembering the fun of the fireworks last year and the goodness of the adventure I had this year.

There are no doubt some spiritual analogies to be drawn from this walk-about. More on that later too, I suppose.