Madhouse diaries : A trip to Lourdes (almost !)

Making the most of the new "free buses at weekends" scheme, I decided to go off for a spot of geocaching with Sophie slightly further afield than usual in the countryside around Dunkirk. After a half hour bus ride, we were in the village of Spycker. As soon as we got off the bus, we discovered this statue of a giant carrying a child in the church grounds.

There was also a very old-fashioned looking well, sadly filled in so we couldn't make a wish.

But this is the main (and in fact only !) attraction in Spycker.

La Grotte Notre Dame de Lourdes (Our Lady of Lourdes Cave), which is a reconstruction of the original. It looks a bit out of place plonked in the middle of a Flemish vilage though !

We found the geocache hidden in a tree but unfortunately it was full of water so we emptied it out and swapped over a few treasures but the logbook was too wet to sign.

We walked a couple of kilometres out of the village until we reached the second geocache, right next to this marker for the Méridienne Verte, a line of trees planted along the Paris meridien from Dunkirk to Barcelona to mark the year 2000.

Now from here, we had planned on doing some of the caches in the Flemish Villages series, which is made up of a whopping 70 caches, all in a straight line, but sadly, we were on the wrong side of the canal and there wasn't a bridge in sight anywhere near us. So we headed to a boulangerie instead !

Sophie opted for possibly the most indulgent dessert ever - a pain au chocolat covered in chocolate and topped with chocolate drops ! It was very nice apparently. As we were out in the sticks, we had a 45 minute wait at the bus stop but it gave us a chance to catch up on life, love and the universe !