Northern Europe Disney Cruise 2022: Exploring Bruges

I can't decide if this day was my second or third favourite day of our cruise. Either way, it ranked very high up there.

This day we were docked in Zeebrugge, Belgium. There were a number of places to spend the day and we decided to do a tour of Bruges. The weather was gorgeous, we met some really fun people, and we had an amazing tour of a really pretty town.

One thing I should mention -- in the past, we've rarely done port adventures through Disney as we've preferred to save money and figure things out on our own. However, after working full-time this past school year, I did not have the energy to plan every single day of our cruise. So we signed up for four port adventures this time. Part of it was we wanted to take advantage of certain things in Europe and part of it was I just couldn't plan as much. This day we did a port adventure which took us on a game-focused tour of Bruges.

Our tour was based on The Game Of The Goose, a Belgian board game. We had to look for the signs on the right to tell us where our next stop was. Our tour guide was an elementary school teacher and she was great at engaging the kids while making it really interesting for the adults too. We enjoyed this day so much! And this was the day we met a family on our cruise whom we spent some time with. They had three girls and we really liked getting to know them.

Bruges was full of canals and swans (which Rachel is acting out above right, as a part of the game we played on our tour!) and beautiful buildings.

I thought the area below was so cool! Back a few hundred years ago, women who had lost their husbands had very few options. So this area was created for them. And ever since then, women have lived in these buildings. The women could keep their riches instead of becoming nuns. No men were allowed in the area. I'm not explaining it well but it was so interesting and I loved that it continues to be a safe space for women to this day. (It's called the Beginhof and you can read more about it here.)

In North America we hear a lot about pipelines which refer to oil. However, in Bruges there is a pipeline specifically for beer. You can see it below, right. You can read more about it here and it's very interesting and well worth the read.

 

After our tour of the town, we shopped for chocolate, and stopped for Belgium waffles. They were delicious!!! Yes, our first few days included sampling all the local carbs loaded with sugar!!!

We were back on the ship by mid-afternoon and again, I don't remember what we did. Probably most afternoons after our adventures in port, we would grab some lunch and the kids would go to the tweens' club. Dave and I would read, walk around the ship, or hang out in the hot tub.

This day we got to meet Mickey and Minnie! I was wearing the shoes I made for our last cruise (inspired by this pin here) and Mickey had the idea for him and Minnie to pose pointing at my shoes. It was such a fun moment! (And for those of you who are wondering, we had to be physically distant from the characters -- no hugging or touching -- but I feel like we still had great interactions with them.)

Sam's perogy appetizer came with caviar on them so he was pretending to be snooty! He was so funny on this cruise!

We celebrated my birthday on this cruise (many people were celebrating belated occasions) and our servers made me a cake out of napkins. I LOVED it and they encouraged me to enjoy it in our stateroom for a few days. It was so fun and beautiful!

After supper the kids would go to the club and Dave and I would grab some tea and walk around. We made a point of walking around Deck 4 (the deck with the outdoor walking/jogging track) at least once every day on this cruise.

One thing which was different for us this cruise was everything we could see as we sailed. In the top right picture, right at the horizon you can see wind turbine farms, which I thought was so cool. Also, the North Sea has a ton of other boat traffic. I think before this cruise, I'd only seen one other ship while our ship was sailing. The North Sea was busy. One night I counted more than 50 other ships around us.

And I enjoyed capturing a cup of my tea and the ocean behind us.

Again, this was such a fun day of our cruise! Up next: I document an "at sea" day so you can see how we spent our days on board the ship.

To read about Day 9, go here.