Day 16    Monday, September 15, 2025

Today we drive to our next location in Brussels. We stop on the way to visit a zoo in Lille, France. It isn’t a very big zoo but we are surprised that senior admission is only €3!

They have a lot of interesting birds. Clockwise… Blue Winged Kookaburra, Helmeted Curassow, Masked Lapwing, Rainbow Lorakeet.

This Crested Partridge seems to like Bob’s whistling.

The Prevost Squirrel lives in tropical forests.  Several of these squirrels are very busy running up and down all the branches in their enclosure. They look like they are playing.

Who doesn’t love Meerkats?  They certainly seem to love each other!

These two huge tapirs share their enclosure…

…with two of these beautiful Maned Wolves from the South American Savannah. They are not in fact related to wolves or foxes. They are their own genus.

This Siamang uses its feet and hands to get at their food.

These are White Pelicans. I am reminded of the time years ago I sat and drew one of these beautiful birds in the Greek Islands. The bird I drew was quite tame and hung about near the fishing wharf. I sat about three feet away from this enormous creature and spent a lovely hour or so drawing him. The locals gave him a name, which I don’t remember, but he was definitely a male.

The last enclosure is a large aviary for tropical birds. These Scarlet Ibis are so colourful and a bit comical with their very long beaks.

Darn, I forgot to take a photo of the information for these birds, except for the Cariama Huppé which is the brown one with feathers on his beak.

After the zoo we head towards the Citadel but unlike the one Bob visited in Arras, this citadel is still in use by the military.

The Lille Citadel is the headquarters for the Rapid Reaction Corps-France.  This is a high-level,   deployable operational unit for the French Army and a NATO-certified force. This unit comprises around 450 soldiers from 14 allied nations.

The white area of the Citadel is used by the military but the surrounding areas have been converted to parkland for the use of the public.

On our way back to the car there is a field with wild flowers.  I am surprised at how many wildflowers I see this late in the year.

Some of the bushes and trees are starting to turn colour.

There is a huge fair setting up next to the parking lot. Too bad we aren’t staying longer.

The weather is all over the place today. Sunny and warn one minute and then cloudy, very windy and rainy the next.  On our drive to Brussels we see a lot of wind turbines.  Many of them are really close to the road. They are so big!Everything was going well until we got close to a town called Tournai. Our route was supposed to take the yellow road that on this map ends in a no entry sign.  Instead we got detoured down the N50 which looked like we would still be OK but we weren’t. We were detoured onto the southbound lane of the highway which had a barrier to allow half of the road to be used for northbound traffic so it was impossible to make an exit left or right!  We had to keep driving..in the wrong direction …until we could get off the detoured road. We then rerouted our map to get to Brussels only to hit more detours, and then Google maps froze!..and Bob is asking me which way to go!!  We find a place to pull over and figure out a work around which means going in the wrong direction again until we get to a place called Mons, where we should be able to take a completely different road to Brussels. That did work but we hit at least four more construction zones where we were detoured again…only this time we kept going in the right direction. Needless to say we were both very happy to finally arrive in Brussels and check in to our Aibnb.

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