Namur; Sunday, 22 February, 2026

The power was actually working in the kitchens this morning, so there was a fair bit more choice for breakfast, and it wasn’t that busy, despite coming down quite a bit later than Saturday morning. After breakfast I headed back to my room, packed my bag, checeked out and then headed out into the light rain that was predicted to last all day.

From the hotel I decided to take the more direct, and more exhausting, route back up to the Citadelle, hiking up the steep path that took me from the river level up around 100m in less than 10 gruelling minutes, not helped by the path being covered in quite slippery mud – where it wasn’t actually a small stream.

I wandered up through the Citadelle complex and into the Esplanade where I had more of a look around, as I’d only had a little bit of time up here the previous day. At present the stadium and theatre, which were built into the abandoned fortifications, reusing some of the shape of the hill, were undergoing restoration works, so it wasn’t actually possible to get into the sites, but I could see the Stadium from the outside and walk around the top of the seating area of the outdoor theatre.

From there I headed over to the chateau, which was created around the same time as the Esplanade was developed, and was never actually a royal residence, or even a stately home, with it always having been a restaurant, a role it still has to today.

With the Esplanade explored I headed back down through the Citadelle, but took a different route down off the hill, coming down the side of the site – through an area which hasn’t yet been restored and were the evidence of a couple of hundred years of Belgium weather are on full display with sections of the bastions having their facing bricks collapsing off the side.

Back down at ground level I crossed over the Sambre with the intention of heading over to the Cathedral to have a look around that, but on reaching the site it was pretty obvious that the Cathedral was closed, with steel fencing completely surrounding the site and scaffolding appearing to hold up some of the windows in the dome it looks like, apart from some occasional services, the building might also be in some distress and in need of repair.

From the Cathedral I walked the short distance back towards the riverside to visit the city’s archaeological and decorative arts museums, housed in a single complex built around a former wealthy family’s home in the city centre the decorative arts museum is housed in the mansion itself, whilst the archaeological museum occupies part of the neighbouring chapel that the complex takes it’s name from as well as a modern glass building.

I spent a good couple of hours looking around the two museums, taking a break from the rain of the day, though by the time I’d finished looking around the weather had taken a distinct turn for the worse with the rain having moved from light to heavy, at which point, given my train was only about 40 minutes away, I took the decision just to head back to the station and wait in the dry there.

Of course, the train was then delayed by 10 minutes which meant more time waiting around, not that was really a problem as I’d given myself 90 minutes in Brussels to make the connection to my Eurostar.

Whilst I’d been in the museum I’d had a text from Eurostar to say that my seat allocation had changed as they’d swapped the trainset over from one of their modern ones to one of the original units, so I wasn’t massively surprised when I got to the Channel Terminal at Brussels-Midi to see that the service had an estimated delay of one hour, which turned out to be pretty accurate as we finally pulled out of the Belgium capital 63 minutes late, and despite Eurostar’s best efforts to make up enough of that time to get under the 60 minute threshold to have to pay out compensation, finally pulled into London an Hour and a quarter behind schedule, but at least it was – for a rare occurrence in early 2026 – dry in London on arrival.