Oostende; Friday, 20 April, 2018

I’d worked from home in the morning, so I was able to make a quick dash up to town and over to St Pancras in time for check-in to open. I already knew I would have a tight connection at Brussels, so I’d deliberately booked a seat that would have me close to the connecting subway at Midi. So it was with quite a lot of annoyance I discovered on check-in that Eurostar had decided to randomly reallocate my seat to the back of the train, making the connection really difficult.

I had a smooth journey through St Pancras and on over to Brussels, where thankfully Infrabel, the Belgium infrastructure operator, was having a bad afternoon with hefty delays to services meaning that with a bit of judicious running I made the connecting train to Oostende by the skin of my teeth.

The train made up some of it’s time so that by the time we reached Oostende it was only a couple of minutes late, but that was enough to ensure I missed the connecting tram round to the hotel – which would have meant either a long walk or a 30-minute wait, but a quick check on Google maps revealed there was a bus leaving from the adjacent bus stands a couple of minutes later.

A few minutes later and I was all checked into the hotel and, after dropping off my stuff and freshening up, I headed out over to the seafront to go for a wander.

It was a beautiful almost summer like evening with the sun setting into the sea. I had a walk along the prom before settling into a seaside restaurant for dinner accompanied by the stunning sunset.

After dinner I had a bit more of a walk before heading back to the hotel and turning in for the night.