Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday (September 23-25)

Encountering rain on Tuesday, we opted for a stay-in day. We had a lot of tasks to run including me going all over the city of Brussels while the family chilled at the house. This included things like going to the bank, talking to the post office on the damage of shipping Big Red home (not that much surprisingly), going to the train station to work out logistics for the next two months and most importantly trying to slow down just a bit from the crazy pace we have been keeping for the last 3 weeks between networking and doing fun sight seeing on the weekends.

We followed the rainy day with a few morning strolls to the park. I got to follow-up on the hundreds of people I’ve been meeting, a task I’ll be working on for well over the next year. And I got to meet Mr. Oliver and Nelson, the friendly black lab that the kids have been talking so much about since my NATO trips to Mons, Belgium. We also strolled around St. Gilles, did a little grocery shopping and most importantly said bon voyage to Big Red!  Sad to see her go, but pumped to get rid of that enormous saddle bag! We are now down to 2 backpacks for the next 2 months, time to get moving again.

Since we opted to slow down for the last few days, we are now getting ready to gear back up again. We’ve been on the fence for Oktoberfest. We’ve been there 3 times and it’s a bit of a hike from Brussels (6 hours by train), but come on…you can’t come all this way and be right on the doorstep of the greatest beer, sausage, pretzel and chocolate chip cookie extravaganza the world has ever seen and not attend. So we made up our minds, we’re headed that way for the weekend.

Tomorrow we break up the long track and move to Frankfurt, Germany, then Saturday to Munich for Oktoberfest, then in the evening back to Frankfurt. Sunday it will be back to Brussels and a few short days after that, we’ll be headed south for warmer weather to Marseille, France and Genoa, Italy for one of the biggest maritime events in Europe!