We left Amsterdam in the pouring rain.  Heaviest on our holiday by far,so glad it wasn’t yesterday.  We were driving about 400km today through Belgium.   We stop at Antwerp, didn’t know where we were going or what we were doing but we parked at what we thought was close to the cente of the city.  It was all very quiet remembering it was Sunday, stop at a cafe for a coffee and a bun.  We weren’t the only male/female couple there but there was a strong influence of male/male including the staff.  Headed back to the car to discover we were in the middle of the red light area where there was some very interesting window shopping and no females strolling.  We loitered there for a bit before continuing our journey.  Stopped off at Bruge for a bit before heading for Dunkirk just over the Belgium border.  Just before the border we got pushed off the motorway to go around a roundabout before going back on.  There were a couple of policemen standing on the roundabout scrutinising us.  We had a little trouble locating our Airbnb lodgings as we were having trouble getting the correct address in and mixing up towns with areas.  If you get to use a GPS in France you will probably understand.  A really nice host, Sophia and Conrad and two very well behaved boys, Soren (5) and Abel (2) in a lovely house in Grande-Snythe.  Settled in and went to the Commercial Centre and had a meal at Flunch, we had a surprisingly good steak, chips and peas for 10 euro each and for another 10 euro we had a small bottle of red wine each and shared cheese and bread.  All very good.

Monday – no rush today we got up late and lazed around.  I needed to go to the bank and ended up going back across into Belgium to get the bank I wanted.  We then just drove into the country along country lanes and passed small villages and corn fields and such before heading back to Dunkirk to the Museum.  We spent a couple of hours wandering around there.  It was very interesting and makes you realise what our forefathers went through for us.  In fact it was probably even a lot worse than we even think if you’d had to live through it.  Went for a stroll along the beach, a big sandy beach a bit like the Kapiti coast, wind blown.  We  then went into town, it was starting to drizzle and the city looked pretty tired compared to some of the places we had seen (so did Antwerp from what we saw).  I got a hair cut at a ladies salon for 13 euro,  I thought it was a reasonable one considering nobody spoke English.  We went back to an electronics and whiteware shop at the Commercial Centre in Grande-Snythe that wasn’t open on Sunday.  A really fantastic selection of stuff much of which I hadn’t seen before.  After checking out many places we went back to Flunch for tea and wasn’t happy to find the steak we had had the night before wasn’t on the Monday menu, grrrrr but we ate there anyway even though it wasn’t as nice.  Like Doug says you shouldn’t go back to a restaurant a second time.  We also explored the supermarket which was the biggest I had ever been in.  We went back to our hosts and had a beer and talked.

Tuesday and we are heading for Mont Saint Michel about 500km away, our biggest days driving.  Stopped along the motorway for a coffee, muffin and wee wee.  It was great driving with not a lot of traffic, a lot of it at 130km/h on toll roads. I think we paid about 16 euros in tolls.  We stopped at Rouen and went for a stroll,  looked around the Cathedral which was being renovated, It was huge and we spent a reasonable amount of time there before having a coffee and back on the road.  We arrived at our host in Mont Saint Michel around 5:30, off loaded and went out to look around and find somewhere to eat.  It was a really nice area, rural and narrow quite roads.  We went out towards the monastery and suddenly struck civilisation.  It looked like the visit was going to be very commercial.  Found this nice little pub for dinner, it was quaint, especially when a mob of sheep came past our window.  I was able to get a photo of the sheep and Mont Saint Michel in the background.  It was back to our BnB, a catch up with our host, and another guest, Paul from Washington DC who had biked down from Amsterdam and heading for Paris.  Very impressive as he only had a small back pack.  Michele our host spoke almost no English so it was good to have Paul who seemed to know quite a bit of French to translate.