How Long the Lonely Road

Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers. —George Carlin I forgot to mention a few things: Between Paris and Brussels I stopped to visit a friend in Lille , right on the border of Belgium and France. There are cannonballs stuck in the walls of the Flemish apartments, and the city boasts that its museum's collection is the largest in France after the Louvre (though I don't think anyone knows how many facts are bent to make that claim). My friend's parents showered me with Italian hospitality, even though their English was rusty and he had to translate both ways. I tried to learn a few words like "Grazie" to help out. They opened two bottles of wine to accompany a big Italian dinner, then invited me to help start a resort in their hometown of Acquapendente in Latium, Italy, which must be the nicest place in the world. My last day in Paris was also very gratifying. I walked up to the top of Montmarte, a nice neighborhood and the ...

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect. —Paul Theroux Brussels, Belgium , is a turd with a candy center. The web of narrow avenues around the Grote Markt are very nice -- beer halls, skinny Flemish buildings, and cafes with heat lamps -- and outside of that are the gleaming mirror-faced buildings of new office parks. If you walk past that, though, you find dirty streets, abandoned construction projects, and filthy Soviet bloc-style tenements with prostitutes under blacklights in the first floor windows. You can see the Rue d'Aerschot, the main drag for less than reputable window shopping in Brussels, when you come in by train to the north station. The ladies of the night pull back the blinds in mid-afternoon and pose smiling in bikinis like its a beauty pagent, or sit on stools and text on their phones. From what I could tell, shoppers are either swaggering Belgian locals who chat up the girls or nervous-looking businessman who can't fully conceal their bespectacled ...

I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. —Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses" So I thought a technical devil destroyed all the photos I took between London and Paris—all of them except the last one I would have chosen to keep: However, the missing photos (500 of them) were miraculously uncovered on one of the hostel computers in Paris after I left. It will probably take a month or two for me to unveil them. In the meantime, here are some pictures of Lille in France and of Brussels and Bruges in Belgium .