Whole day as tourist

No ride today, I spent the whole day as a tourist sightseeing around Ghent with my daughter. Well not actually the whole day, since I took advantage of the sale season to buy a new bike case to replace the one with smashed locks courtesy of Qatar Airways. I'd been in last week and thought they were an excellent price but today they were 50 Euros cheaper, so I was pretty happy with that.

Then we drove into Ghent to have look at the old town and get some lunch. The traffic was amazing light and the parking very easy which surprised me until I realised that Ghent festival main concert events finished over the weekend. So we got wander around the old town in relative tranquility although there were still a few party goers still drinking in groups from the weekend, they must have a lot more staying power than me!

The old town is packed with history and historical buildings which I always find fascinating but what was almost more fascinating was the activity in de constructing some of the amazing structures assembled for the various concert acts, VIP enclosures, bars, concession stands etc etc. Given that Ghent is a very very old town and the squares and open areas may have been adequate in the middle ages for markets and the like but there is an area for big sound stages and hundreds of thousands of people. Solution; erect them above the canal network, a lot of structures where placed over the canals on massive steel girders. The construction, the fitting out, the wiring, the sound systems, the generators etc etc must have been enormously expensive to ship in, assemble and now take apart, seeing it all without the distraction of thousands of people easily reveraled the complexity of what had been achieved. It was all pretty impressive that's for sure.

Back to the hotel for a pleasant dinner, it was pretty quiet actually, probably to do with the rain we were getting so we had a lot of time with the staff, loads of raucous laughing going, so all in all a very light hearted enjoyable day. Back to the serious stuff of racing tomorrow, near Eeklo which is Roger Devlaeminck territory for those old enough to remember "Mr Paris Roubaix'.