We celebrate a special day in our relationship every March. Each year, around the middle of the month, we try to go away somewhere. This year we decided to "celebrate" with a trip down to Spa, Belgium. We'd originally planned on choosing one of KLM's last minute fares and going where ever the airline would take us (for cheap)... but then we remembered that this was our friend Kari's last week in Eindhoven and we had planned to have dinner with her on Friday night. Kari has been a great friend to us over the last 6 months and we're going to miss her incredibly when she returns to the States. It would be unacceptable to miss our last dinner together!
We enjoyed a great evening with Kari on Friday and a (relatively) quiet sleep before getting up mid-morning on Saturday. There was no rush to get out of town... we knew that Spa was a simple 1.5-hour drive from Eindhoven... so, we had a hearty breakfast before packing up and heading out. We arrived in Spa around 3:30 and checked into our Hotel. Wow! We were impressed with our room! (It was larger than our current apartment! How un-Euro!) We wandered around the charming town of Spa in search of some snacks and a bottle of wine. We could've crashed after the snacks, but I would have missed the best part of our visit to Spa - dinner.
We've previously commented about Belgian food in this journal. The old cliché is that Belgian cuisine is supposed to be French style with German portions. And that is exactly what we experience. We were both extremely tired so we opted to try the hotel restaurant. Honestly, it looked like one of the nicest places in town anyway... and the walk to get there was short. We both chose the set menu, a 4-course meal for 25 Euros. The appetizers were gorgeous. The soup of shrimp, exotic vegetables and cheese in a lobster cream sauce was spectacular... and the main course was a wonderful meat (beef or lamb... we're not sure!?) served in a sweet tasting sauce with the most beautiful little vegetables. I can not stop raving about the vegetables!! They were pieces of art! A small bundle of steamed carrot slices bound together by a green onion, 20 or so green beans wrapped in a thin slice of Ardennes Ham, an ornately decorated zucchini and a tomato that had been beautifully cooked with garlic and herbs! Fantastic!! If I'd had my camera, I would have taken pictures!! We had a bottle of wonderful French wine and two bottles of, of course, SPA mineral water. We finished it all off with Crème Brule. Yummy!
Sunday we got out and did a little exploring. We felt great after a long nights sleep in a quiet, dark room. We took a walk along some hillside hiking trails where we were treated to some great views of Spa and the rolling hills that are common in the Ardennes region. We also wandered around town. In addition to being famous for it's waters and lending its name to Spas all over the world, Spa is also home to the world's oldest casino. While we were wandering around town, we came across the Original Spa spring. Of course, Mark had to have a taste of the water and determined that it was, "Not particularly palatable... basically like drinking rusty water." Let's just say you wouldn't voluntarily opt to drink much of the unpurified stuff..
