It is easy to find fried potatoes in Belgium. You can even get them with mayonnaise. (Don’t know why you would want them that way, but that is another discussion.) And don’t call them French Fries – it tends to annoy Belgian folks! Places to camp for the night, on the other hand, were a bit rare. We were coming up on a weekend and the Belgian national day and the options were few.

So we abandoned our faithful Park4Night and turned to iOverlander (https://ioverlander.com ) And thus we ended up on a pig farm an hour or so north of the Waterloo battlefield.  The hosts were charming, super helpful, and we enjoyed chatting to them. (They even had geese.)

The Battle of Waterloo was “the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life”, according to the Duke of Wellington, and he ought to know, he was there. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Waterloo) We have never been great Napoleonic Wars students, but they set the stage for much of modern Europe. So we had to visit the site.

The best formula appeared to be to drive to the battlefield, visit, and then continue on to another iOverlander site near Ghent. After some GPS futzing around, we found a large, legal lot. We took the path to the new underground Visitors Center so as to learn some of the history of the battle.  It was very well done and very informative.  (https://www.waterlooassociation.org.uk/resources/visitor-guide-to-waterloo/) After lunch in the restaurant, we went to work off the calories by climbing the 265 steps to the Butte de Lion, the artificial hill in the middle of the former British lines.

The view from the top was quite spectacular.  It made the step climbing worthwhile! 

We also visited the huge diorama. These were a big thing at one time; there is a similar diorama at Gettysburg.

Then on to Ghent, to another I-Overlander site, this time the garden of a fellow overlander, who had just completed a multi year trip to Saudi Arabia in a Mercedes even older than ours. But before we left we had to give a tour to two highway patrol officers who stopped when they saw me climbing into the camper, not using the steps! They loved the tour and could not understand why the GPS had marked the road to the parking lot as restricted. Sigh. GPS – can’t live without it, but occasionally it gets a bee in its bonnet about something.