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The Channel Tunnel hadn't been built yet (I'm not entirely certain we would have taken it anyway) so our choices were either the hydrofoil or the hovercraft ferry. The hovercraft floated atop a cushion of air created by the powerful turbines directed underneath the ship. The hydrofoil raised itself out of the water on two wing-like structures that projected out of the bottom of the hull. Both looked so cool! But the hydrofoil was a little cheaper so poorer heads prevailed.

We boarded the ferry and strapped ourselves into our seats. It was like sitting in a really wide airplane - same seats, same portholes, and the staff dressed in flight attendant garb. They even gave a similar safety lecture before we left. Only there were no oxygen masks to drop down and a "water landing" was pretty much a given. The craft began to move. Mike and I waited for the g-forces of high acceleration to push us back. We headed out of the bay and watched the chalky white cliffs of Dover (so that's what that phrase meant!) slide by. Any minute now and the hypercharged warp engines would kick in and we'd be a blur over the sea! Any minute now.

Whenever they're ready.
Okay.
Go ahead.
Any minute now.

After about three hours, we figured that the warp engines were out of service. When I confided this suspicion to the stranger sitting on my left, she informed me that this pokey motion was, in fact, the top speed of the hydrofoil. Disappointed in the pedestrianism of it all, I recalled how spiffy and futuristic our boat had appeared in Dover, watching the hydrofoil decelerate from what appeared to be lightning fast velocities and gently settle back down into the water on its wings underneath. It may have been faster than the six-hour boat trip, but it still looked way cooler on Johnny Quest.

When we arrived in Belgium, we disembarked through customs and just waltzed into the country. A bored-looking customs agent waved people past his station, and another agent occasionally directed individuals, apparently selected at random, over to himself to stamp their passports and send them merrily on their way into his country to perform whatever acts of terrorism they may have plotted, all without so much as glancing up to check that their visage actually matched their passport photo.

Being the fanatics about rules and standards that Americans tend to be, Mike and I found this situation intolerable. How could that first fellow just wave us on into an entire continent? No questions, no interview, not even a scrap of paperwork to fill out! We could be minions for Satan himself and he wasn't even going to stamp our passports! Don't you want to know that we're here? After all, we're AMERICANS!

Disgusted with this obvious complete disregard for everything decent and orderly, it was now our mission in life to have our passports stamped. After all, what's the point of traveling internationally if you don't have any stamps to show for it? We walked up to the other customs agent and showed him our blank passports. Wordlessly, he looked at them and then back up at us with a look that said What? I didn't randomly select you for passport stamping. What do you want me to do with those?

"Don't you want to stamp our passports?" Mike asked.
His look changed to that of one who just found that a previously unknown relative had died and he had inherited a half-dozen retarded children to raise on his own. With a tired sigh, he accepted the immense burden of lifting the stamp and pressing it to Mike's passport. Then he did it again to my passport, an equally weighty task. Thus exhausted, he tossed them back at us.

Triumphant, Mike and I marched out of the ship terminal and looked around. We found the train station and boarded the train bound for Brugge. We changed our pronunciation of the city's name from 'broozh' to the more correct 'broo-guh' when the ticket agent in the train station refused to sell us a ticket, presumably on the grounds that 'Broozh' didn't exist, until we said the name correctly.

I was not warming up to these Belgians at all.

No Rooms in Brugge