Belgian National Day with Old Friends

My CG classmate Kathy and her family came through Brussels on their European tour.  It was great to see all of them after almost ten years!  We were most impressed by their packing, they were backpacking it and travelling the lightest of all of our summer guests.

Jim, Kathy, Elaine, Greg

Urbanic & Hughes kids

They timed their visit perfectly to see Belgian National Day which is the Belgian 4th of July.  What was interesting about the National Day was that it was a work day for all the Belgian Armed Services as they set up equipment, demonstrations and displays all through the main streets of Brussels.  We went down to the main park to check it all out, here is what we found...

Free sunglasses at this booth..I think it was for a bank?

Charlie and James stood in line forever to try this out.  We were entertained by the high school age girls working it who were more interested in their cell phones than moving the line along!

Booths lines the streets and tons of people were out to see it all!

There is a big parade late in the afternoon, where the King and Queen and family arrive at the reviewing stand to watch everyone go by.  We were lucky enough to be able to see the King's car from a distance and then watch the Royal Family from a big screen.

Here is the Royal Family on the reviewing stand from a local website:

I love that the King&Queen are about our age and the kids are the same rough ages as ours!  Lady in red is Queen Mathilde and King is in Purple sash.  The 4 kids are to the left.  I don't know who the lady in the cream dress is...

I loved the front guy's beard!

We looped around behind the back of the reviewing stand and saw the mounted riders coming by  guess was they were the King's Calvary but I'm really not sure who they were but they looked and sounded very impressive.

The parade was complete with "giants" something that the Belgian towns all pride themselves on having.  Americans like our Macy's Parade balloons, the Belgians like giant puppets-some of them are very old.

Even a giant horse!

We also liked all the fly overs.  Early in the week we had seen them practicing, we were out in our backyard when the helicopters flew over...

They also had F-16's fly over too...

This photo was taken by a local website too, I was not fast enough with my camera!

We also walked down to check on the famous Mannekin Pis statue and he was dressed up in his special National Day outfit, here he is...

This group of guys were right by the statue, they were dressed identically to Mannekin Pis, so I'm guessing maybe they are the ones who guard him or change his outfits?  I could have asked them but they all posed for some photos and walked over to the pub to finish their beers!

            Louna gave our visitors her stamp of approval!

Kelly arrived home just in time to take the photos at the start of this post, she had been at the Coast Guard's AIM program all week.  She was telling us all about her experience.  It was fun because Kathy had gone to AIM many moons ago.   It sounded like a hard week for her, but a rewarding one too, she certainly has a better idea of what next summer would be like if she were to attend.

The Urbanic family was pleasantly surprised by Brussels, it wasn't a city they would put on a bucket list for their European tour, but thought it really had a ton of cool things to see and do (besides just the Hughes family)! We hope more of you will come and see for yourselves if you agree with their review!