Hal Jespersen’s European Barge Trip, May 2026 [Part 2]

These are my (Hal’s) notes on my trip from Amsterdam to Paris on the luxury canal barge Aurora, arranged through the Hotels Afloat agency. Nancy and I were originally scheduled to take this trip together, but she decided to send me alone while she dealt with some lingering health issues at home. My companions are our long-time travel friends from Cincinnati, Ray and Pat.

Since this is a lengthy report with lots of photos (iPhone 17 Pro Max), I have broken it into four parts:

Wednesday, May 13 — Ghent

The day started out sunny, but that did not last. Once again, we employed the van to take us to our destination expeditiously while the boat proceeded at its own pace, conforming to lock schedules and tidal tables. We drove to Ghent, a city on the River Scheldt with roots going back to a 7th-century monastic settlement. It has grown into an industrial city and Belgium’s second-largest port. It hosts lots of well-preserved Renaissance buildings.

St. Bavo’s Cathedral (Sint-Baafskathedraal) is a Gothic structure built over several centuries, with Romanesque elements dating to around 942 AD. The crypt houses a well-executed VR and holographic presentation that walks you through the cathedral’s history and sets up the main attraction upstairs. We all looked pretty funny wearing the VR helmets.

The primary attraction is Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, completed in 1432. The twelve-panel polyptych opens to reveal God the Father enthroned above, flanked by the Virgin and St. John the Baptist, with panels of angels and, at the extremes, Adam and Eve. The lower central panel—the one that names the work—shows a great heavenly meadow crowded with apostles, martyrs, pilgrims, and warriors converging on the Lamb of God, blood flowing into a chalice, drawing on the Book of Revelation and Eucharistic theology. A good interpretive display explains the symbolism. Recent restoration has returned the colors to something close to their original state, and it looks spectacular. The painting has one of the stranger histories in art—seized by French revolutionaries, partially stolen in 1934 with one panel still missing, looted by Nazis—so the fact that it survives at all is somewhat remarkable. The cathedral also holds a notable Cavalry Triptych and a large complement of Flemish funerary monuments.

Lunch was at ’t Vosken (the Little Fox), where I photographed the menu and asked Claude AI to translate and make a recommendation. The answer was Gentse waterzooi, Ghent’s traditional chicken and vegetable stew, soupy and light rather than rich, which suited the afternoon well enough.

The Gravensteen, or the Castle of the Counts, dates from 1180 and was built by Philip of Alsace on the model of crusader castles he’d seen in the Holy Land. It served as the county seat until 1353, then passed through incarnations as a court, prison, mint, and cotton mill before restoration in 1893–1903. The audio tour is deliberately comic in tone—useful for navigating the rooms of medieval torture implements—and works better than it probably should. A downpour diminished parts of the experience that were outside on slippery stone steps.

A scheduled city walking tour was abandoned when the rain made the decision for us. We sat and drank under a café awning for an hour instead, which turned out to be a reasonable way to spend the time. Back in the van, we drove to the Scheldt and met Aurora, which had just arrived from Antwerp.

Thursday, May 14 — Bruges

We drove about 45 minutes and arrived to find Bruges (pronounced “BRU-heh,” reduced to one clipped syllable that sounds like you are clearing your throat) in the grip of Ascension Thursday—a holiday that effectively paralyzes the historic core of the city. We parked outside the downtown area and walked in through crowds already gathering along streets fenced off for parade crowd control, church bells marking the occasion from every direction.

The walk revealed the first of what our guide would later tell us are at least 100 chocolate shops in the city, along with numerous candy stores. I picked up some cuberdons—a Belgian specialty—which were delicious. We made our way to the Grote Markt, where bleachers had been erected around the square in anticipation of the afternoon parade. It is overshadowed by the Belfry of Bruges, a very tall tower that could be climbed to see a view of rooftops. We joined a walking tour at 11:30 led by a guide named Emil, who proved to be both humorous and well-informed. The rain started almost immediately.

Emil walked us through the city’s history. The founding legend centers on Baldwin I—known as Baldwin Iron Arm—a minor Frankish nobleman who, en route to establishing what would become Bruges, is said to have killed a marauding bear. He later eloped with Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald of West Francia, triggering a papal intervention before Charles was finally forced to accept the marriage and appointed Baldwin “Margrave of Flanders” to defend the region against Viking raids. The bear has had a long afterlife in the city: the official mascot of Club Brugge, the city’s football club, is a bear—explicitly tied to the Baldwin legend.

The city grew into a major commercial center during the medieval period, driven largely by the cloth trade, which brought wealth and outside influence flowing through its 16 kilometers of canals. Among the stops was outside the Gruuthusemuseum, a patrician mansion that touches on the history of the local beer industry, sitting adjacent to the Church of Our Lady (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk), a Gothic structure that ranks as the second-tallest brick building in Europe (after La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona). Inside is a marble Madonna and Child by Michelangelo—originally commissioned by the Pope, who then rejected it—notable for having been looted twice, once by Napoleon and once by the Nazis, before being returned each time. The church was closed today.

Emil also brought us to a 12th-century hospital that remained in operation until its last patient in 1976. A statue on the grounds commemorates Dr. Thomas Montanus, a physician who attempted to treat plague victims with outlandish remedies that Emil described with some amusement. The tour concluded at the city hall, a dramatically beautiful building, where Emil explained the organization of the Ascension Day parade and recounted the story of the Holy Blood—a relic venerated at the adjacent Basilica of the Holy Blood (Basiliek van het Heilig Bloed). The relic was not in residence today; it had been taken out to be carried in the parade. The city hall statue of Baldwin I, first Margrave of Flanders, stands nearby as a reminder of where it all started.

Lunch was moules-frites, Bruges style, with beer and curry—a good meal, and the weather had finally cleared by the time we finished. We watched perhaps a third of the parade afterward, a procession of marchers in religious and medieval costumes with a few bands and animals interspersed. I filmed a few of the equine participants as they headed home; we had already spotted trailers carrying sheep and donkeys waiting in the staging area, which gave some sense of the scale of the production.

We finished the afternoon with a thirty-minute canal boat ride through the city’s 16 km waterway network. A lot of the scenery was familiar from the city streets that we walked before, but one highlight was a view of the hotel that was used in the 2008 movie In Bruges—the one from where Colin Farrell jumped out of the window into the canal. (Our guide said that he did that over 17 takes.) I also enjoyed seeing swans and a family of coots swimming around; I had never seen a baby coot. We returned to the boat in Ghent for the night.

Friday, May 15 — Oudenaarde

Now that we are mostly out of the turbulent river systems of the Netherlands and Belgium, we are easing into the normal routine of this boat: scenic canal cruising in the morning, lunch on board, and then driving (or walking) off to visit local sites. We departed Ghent at 8:30 a.m. and puttered along woodsy terrain on the very narrow Scheldt. Temps in the mid-40s and passing showers kept our shore watching inside. At a river lock at 11, in the middle of a torrential downpour with hail, we were raised up about 10 feet. Another lock at 12:30 near Oudenaarde was about 6 feet up.

After lunch, the weather mostly cleared, and we took a short van hop through Oudenaarde, a town whose center dates to the 12th century. The main draw was the MOU Museum, housed in the city hall building alongside the belfry. Our guide was named Mieke. The city hall itself holds several notable spaces. The People’s Hall contains heraldic material related to Charles V of the Habsburg line, and the Aldermen’s Chambers display a 16th-century equestrian portrait of Louis XIV. Four weddings were scheduled in the building today, which made me think this was still a locally important cultural place.

The museum’s primary subject is tapestry; Oudenaarde became a prosperous leader in the cloth industry and was a significant tapestry-producing center, second only to Brussels. Mieke walked us through the techniques involved, and the collection includes a 16th-century series depicting the life of Alexander the Great, a number of animal subjects, activities of the local residents, and some very green pastoral scenes called Verdure.

There is also an interactive station where visitors can try their hand at designing a tapestry—Ray chose to create one featuring a dog—a restoration room with a small loom, and a silver collection. The latter was impressive but paled in comparison to the gigantic room with massive, beautiful wooden beams holding up the ceiling. We walked back to the boat but didn’t find anything interesting on the way. It’s a sleepy place. We were treated to a local restaurant, Brasserie de Cridts, for dinner off the boat. I had an NA Belgian kriek (sour cherry beer), which is a local favorite, but it’s essentially like cherry soda.

Saturday, May 16 — Tournai

A lovely sunny morning, although it’s still pretty chilly, low 40s. We departed Oudenaarde about 8 and enjoyed some very nice farm and village scenery as we headed southwest. At 9:30, we encountered our first lock of the day in Kluisberg, rising about six feet. The Scheldt around here marks the border between Flanders (Flemish/Dutch speakers) and Wallonia (French). Another lock in Spiere-Helkijn, eight feet up. As we approached the lock in Tournai, overcast skies returned, but we stayed dry all afternoon. We tied up to a fuel barge alongside the Scheldt—a floating hardware store as much as a fueling stop—before heading into Tournai for a walking tour organized through the visitor center, which is part of the cathedral complex.

Tournai is one of Belgium’s oldest cities, founded as a Roman road crossing on the Scheldt and known then as Turnacum. It became the first capital of the Frankish Merovingian dynasty under Childeric I and his son Clovis I in the late 5th century, making it something of the cradle of what would eventually become France. Through the medieval period, it flourished as a center of tapestry production—the UN headquarters in New York has examples—as well as goldsmiths and sculptors of note, including the painter Rogier van der Weyden, who was born here. Louis XIV captured the city in 1668, and his influence is visible in portions of the architecture. The town center was heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe in May 1940, deliberately targeting civilian refugees to clog the roads and impede the Allied retreat; much of what stands today is careful postwar reconstruction. Throughout the city, the local limestone called pierre bleue gives many buildings and streets a characteristic blue-gray cast, and some of the cobblestones are engraved with the letter P for Pax Romana, marking the line of the original Roman road.

The centerpiece is the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Tournai, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The site has Roman-era origins, but the building as it stands today is effectively three phases of construction cobbled together: a major rebuilding project began around 1030, the Romanesque nave being the first section to survive intact, followed by a massive Romanesque transept crowned with five towers reaching 83 meters, and finally a Gothic choir added centuries later. The result is one of the most architecturally complex cathedrals in northern Europe. The five towers lean noticeably—some by as much as a meter—a consequence of the soft ground and, more recently, a tornado that struck in 2000.

Walking along the Scheldt, we saw the Pont des Trous, a fortified water gate spanning the Scheldt, built beginning in 1281. It took nearly 50 years to complete, the arches being finished around 1329. We had passed under it when the ship entered the city. During the May 1940 retreat, British engineers blew the arches to slow the German advance; they were rebuilt in 1948 and then reconstructed again between 2019 and 2023 to widen the navigable channel for modern river traffic. The towers are rounded on the exterior to deflect cannonballs and flat on the city-facing side—a small but telling detail of medieval military engineering. Nearby, a remnant of the 12th-century city wall still stands. A plaque on the waterfront attributes the town’s November 1918 liberation to the “Vth British Army,” which, pace my incomplete expertise about World War I, does not sound like the correct army. (The Fifth Army was disbanded after it was overrun by the Germans in their spring 1918 offensive.) Not mentioned here, but in WWII, Tournai was in the path of the U.S. First Army, which crossed the Belgian border on September 2, 1944, while the British Second Army at the same time received orders to advance on Brussels. On September 3, Tournai—the first Belgian city to be freed—was liberated by a combined force of American and British troops.

We reached the Grand Place, the main market square, rebuilt after the wartime destruction. Dominating one side is the 13th-century belfry, the oldest in Belgium, which was deliberately built taller than the cathedral towers nearby to make the civic point that secular authority had its own standing alongside the religious. Inside the cathedral, only the Romanesque nave was open; the Gothic choir section has been closed for renovation for 26 years, and the transept with its five towers has recently been shut as well. One unexpected pleasure was a large model of the complete cathedral constructed entirely from wooden clothespins (before Legos, apparently).

The Musée des Beaux-Arts was closed in preparation for a “museum night” event, so we could not get in. The building, opened in 1928, is the only museum Victor Horta ever designed as such from the ground up—its plan is famously shaped like a turtle, with a central sculpture hall ringed by radiating galleries, and it marks Horta’s transition from Art Nouveau toward Art Deco. The collection runs from Flemish Primitives—including Van der Weyden, Bruegel, and Campin—through 17th-century masters such as Rubens and Jordaens, and into the Impressionists: Monet, Seurat, Van Gogh, and two Manets that are reportedly the only examples of his work on public display in Belgium.

After the tour, we drove across the French border to Valenciennes to rejoin the ship. Aurora was making her way south on the canal, and the plan was to meet it at a city park along the waterfront. We parked, and right on schedule, the ship came gliding up to the edge of the park. We stepped aboard. It was a good way to end the day, but we improved upon it by having a delicious confit du canard for dinner. At bedtime we were serenaded by the sounds of fireworks from the nearby Spring Fun carnival.

Go to Part 3.