Belgium man! Belgium!

Before I start I'd like to say that I quite like Belgium and I'd like to go back to Brussels and have a better look round. I also think it is worth noting that the country does exist contrary to what some people would have you believe. That is unless what follows was the product of some fevered imagining and I suppose lookig back on it that is a distinct possibility. I am pretty sure it actually happened other people remember similar events, but they could be fevered imaginings also, so who knows:

It seemed like a good idea at the time, travel to Brussels for the weekend and see Dire Straits in concert. The only downside would be the coach trip to get there and back, but it would be like a school field trip without the clipboards and the inane questions you had to find answers to, not too bad then. Why is it that school trips always had to be marred with the overtly educational element. If the place you are going to is sufficiently interesting then you should learn stuff on your own, not have it thrust down your throat. If you don't have the ability to learn stuff on your own you shouldn't be allowed on field trips until you learn how to. I suppose that wouldn't work going to the 'Learn how to go on a field trip' field trip, but nothing is perfect. I don't actually believe that nothing is perfect, but I have digressed too much.

So we turned up at Victoria Coach Station to catch the coach, we being myself, my wife, my sister and her husband. The coach was late, as it continued to be late the guys who had brought a load of beer for the trip had decided that it had already begun and started on the conversion process from alcohol to urine. They obviously had been practising because they were quite good at it. The coach refused to arrive and we got cold, but it was the beginning of what promised to be a great holiday - we couldn't have been more wrong.

The coaches arrived and we finally began to board, but as we approached the back of the coach we found that there wasn't enough room for all four of us, so Carol (my wife) and I went off to the other coach. We'd forgotten about the beer swilling blokes in the rush of boarding the coach and it wasn't until we were underway that we realised that we were sitting just in front of them.

Now it was after midnight and most of us wanted to get some sleep, but our beery friends wanted to party and continued to swig from bottles and make a lot of noise. Unfortunately for them they hadn't planned ahead very well (typical drunks) and they forgot that once you drank a lot you then needed to use a toilet. The coach didn't have one and being behind schedule it wasn't going to stop more than once on the way to Dover and that stop was a long way off. So our drunk friends came up with a cunning plan: they decided to pee into a plastic bag. They were sitting on the back seat of the coach and starting from one end they each used the bag and passed it to their friend on the right. Again not being strong on the forward thinking front they hadn't come up with a scheme to dispose of the bag bulging with urine once they had all used it. However, the last man in line was sitting next to the emergency exit and as discretion is the better part of valour so expediency is the better part of not having to hold a bag full of your mates pee for an hour so he decided to open the emergency exit and lob the bag out.

It was only afterwards that I imagined the scene from a car following the coach...you could imagine being in a car driving along the motorway on a clear cool evening without a rain cloud in the sky when woosh your windscreen is covered in what you must assume is a cloudburst until the smell starts to seep into the car and you start to wonder whether you've been hit by a low flying toilet or those stories about frozen pee dropping from airliners is true and it hit your car after defrosting.

Back in the coach we eventually arrive at Dover and boarded the ferry for the trip to Zeebrugge. The crossing was as uneventful as it was uncomfortable. In those days we didn't have the channel tunnel so there was none of this 'cruising across' (not that I'm entirely convinced that it is different now, I haven't been on a ferry since). The seats were very hard and we all had a bad night apart from my brother-in-law who had found the ferry's cinema replete with comfy seats and had bedded down there for the night. He failed to come and share this discovery with us for which I think he will eventually be cast into the pit of despair. In Pilgrim's Progess Christian has trouble in the slough of despond, this always reminds me of Slough. I've only ever driven through Slough and whilst it might be a lovely place it did seem to have its fair share of despond, perhaps Bunyan had visited there also.

The journey to Brussels was equally uncomfortable and the only highlight if you can call it that was witnessing one of our drunks blantantly stealing food from a service station we stopped at.

When we finally arrived in Brussels and found the hotel we also found that they didn't have a room for my wife and I. So whilst everyone else checked in and collapsed into their rooms we were left sitting on the coach waiting for the tour company to sort it out. This they eventually did and we were put in the room next to the drunks. This wasn't as bad as it sounded except for finding one of them in the corridor at one time urinating up against the wall. The walls must have been quite thick because we found out later that they had trashed the room. The rooms were really nice with a little kitchen and dining area that featured a glass table. The glass was resting on suckers on the ends of four stainless steel legs that were joined together to give the whole thing stability. The drunks had lifted the glass table top off and thrown it from the window. We were on the fourth floor.

We spent the following day site-seeing. We had to leave Brussels town centre early because there was a riot after a demonstration by miners. We didn't see any trouble just lots of police.

We then went to see the Atomium which was fun and then off to a fun fair which wasn't. We were told that we needed to be back for the coach at a certain time or the coach would leave without us. We were dutifully back on time, unfortunately some of the others weren't. They were drinking at an open air bar. We knew this because we drove past them on our way back to the hotel. When they saw the coaches they left their beers and started running after us. They didn't catch us up and had to make their own way back to the hotel.

That evening we went off to see the concert. There were two coaches and we were in the second coach. I don't think our driver knew his way to the venue as he seemed very keen to keep up with the first coach. The first coach driver was on a mission, I think the mission involved causing a major accident. His plan seemed to involve going through traffic lights that were just about to change to red. Obviously if the first coach was going through on amber, we were going through on red. We went through a couple of sets like this and then the first coach upped the ante and went through a light at red. I'm not sure how many of us had our eyes closed, I suspect our driver did, but we made it through and arrived at the stadium.

We were told by the tour guides that we needed to be back at the coaches immediately after the concert ended because we were on a tight schedule to catch the ferry home. There was to be no waiting for encores and after the incident with the guys being left in Brussels everyone was back on the coach in plenty of time.

We set off looking forward to getting home and after a few hours into the journey the coach driver noticed that there was a problem with the coach and pulled off onto the hard shoulder of the motorway. He vainly flashed his lights at the other coach, but to no avail. The other coach driver wanted to make the ferry, he wasn't going to stop to see what was wrong with us.

After sometime, I think the engine had overheated, we were able to get underway again. We arrived at the ferry terminal just in time to see the ferry leaving. So we had a three hour wait for the next ferry, which was a freight ferry and proved to be more uncomfortable than the first with no onboard cinema. One thing I learnt whilst at Zeebrugge was that you can't open bottles of beer by trying to smash the ends off, we had our duty free, but no bottle opener. We eventually found that the local cafe had one on the wall that was meant for patrons, but like the rebels we weren't we used it anyway. We left Zeebrugge just wanting to get home and have done with it. When we finally arrived at Dover we went through passport control having been told that we only needed to remove our hand luggage from the coach. This we did and reboarded the coach to travel back to London. When we arrived the luggage was unloaded from the back of the coach and our bags weren't there. I had a green rucksack and Carol had a flourescent pink holdall style bag so they should have been easily recognisable. We questioned the driver who said that someone had picked these bags up and gone off down the road. I'd had enough, whoever had stolen my bags was going to be seriously damaged, I ran off with my brother-in-law to find the culprits. We searched the road and the local underground station, but found no one. When we returned Carol and my sister were on their own and had been told that is was possible that the bags had been left in Dover.

The only upside of this situation was that Carol worked for a haulage company who had an office at Dover and they were able to retrieve our luggage and send it up to us at no charge.

So I'm pretty sure it all happened like that, but you can never be completely sure of anything.