our mini-trip to Bruges

Farrell’s commute (which I do not envy at all) involves two bikes, a train, and about 3 hours total every day. He rides a bike from our house to a train station, catches a train to Bruges, then rides a second bike to his office at the far side of the town (beyond the cute and charming part, if you can believe it exists). With all the bike riding, he gets sweaty, so he packs his work clothes with him to change into when he gets to the office.

But Farrell can be a bit absent-minded sometimes, especially on Mondays, when the lull of a lazy weekend hasn’t quite snapped him back into his weekday routine. Sometimes he forgets his work clothes.

Cue Darwin and me to the rescue. One day, Farrell had important meetings scheduled and was only decked out in a sweaty old t-shirt. Since Darwin didn’t have anything pressing on his schedule, we headed out on an epic journey of public transportation. I present to you a blog post made up entirely of phone pictures (when juggling a giant toddler and a bag of clothes in the rain and crossing many streets, a DSLR is not in the cards), mostly selfies. So, you’ve been warned.

First, we walk across the silliest, most crooked, “no, seriously, this is really something I’m supposed to walk across?” bridge to get to a bus stop on the other side of the river.

We wait patiently. It’s raining.

Bus stop selfie!

(The first of many.)

Our route was bus-train-bus-repeat, but we could’ve also taken a bus that goes straight to Bruges. I write this as if it were a legitimate option, but really, that bus takes three hours in one direction, while the train takes about 30-40 minutes. No brainer, but it was a coincidence to see the Bruges bus patiently waiting there right as we arrived at the train station.

We arrived a bit early and the platform was packed with commuters heading to Brussels.

So we waited.

And waited.

And waited for our train to arrive.

The train was fairly empty, so we had an entire section of seats to ourselves.

(He’s spying on a group of hipsters with packs of cookies across the aisle.)

We’re sort of sight-seeing in Bruges. Look! Off in the distance is some sort of medieval-looking tower… thing. How charming and historic, now we’re off to find another bus.

The incredibly not-charming industrial park where Farrell’s office is. Because it was raining, the clothing hand-off was short and sweet.

Another bus stop selfie.

“Hey Darwin, did we see Daddy?” “Daddy! Daddy!” and then he started waving.

Even though we just had to get on the same exact bus that dropped us off (we were at the end of the route and just had to circle back), the bus driver made us wait at the bus stop across the street for 10 minutes. In the rain.

Taking the train back to Ghent.

Lovely scenery! There probably were better scenes to capture, but I had to wrangle a wriggly toddler.

I had woken Darwin up early from his morning nap, so I wasn’t surprised when on the final bus ride, just minutes away from our stop, he finally passed out.

From now on, Farrell keeps an extra set of work clothes at his office. If we decide to go visit him at work, we’ll pick a nicer day to do so.