The Duke of Wellington came out victorious and the victors always write (and possibly rewrite) history. Following the battle of Waterloo, Wellington consolidated his army. The Prussians, meanwhile, pursued Napoleon and eventually captured him. The description of the Prussians at the visitor’s center was that they were “vengeful”. Based on what all Napoleon had done to them, I think they had some right to be seeking vengeance. The pyramid-shaped hill was built by hand, one peasant basketful of dirt after another. The walkway to the top is barely visible on the right side of the hill and some folks can be seen on the staircase. It was far more climbing that I wanted to do!

Napoleon had escaped from prison and rounded up a huge army. He headed north towards Brussels in an attempt to cut off the Prussians from meeting up with Wellington’s bunch. Unfortunately, Napoleon was at least a day late in this venture. The Prussians arrived in the late afternoon and caused Napoleon to have to fight on two fronts. The result was defeat. Off Napoleon went to exile once again. This time he did not escape and died in 1821, some six years later.

For such an important battle, there isn’t much readily available to describe or interpret the events leading up to, during, and after the battle. Waterloo is in French-speaking Belgium and perhaps that has something to do with it — a battle the French would rather forget. I had a pleasant drive down, a nice couple of hours looking around, and a nice drive back. As I was leaving the parking lot, a couple walking along the other side of the street flagged me down and wanted to know if I was headed into town. They had been out on a walk and the four kilometers back to the train station was now more than they wanted to do. I had them climb in and off we went to the train station. They are living in Brussels. He’s from Berlin and spoke better German than English. We had a nice chat for the short drive into the city. They said that this was going to be their Sunday activity when the weather was reasonably descent — take the train out of town somewhere and go for a walk. Their goal is to walk as far as from Brussels to Paris by early summer. Good for them and I hope it all works out. I can also sympathize with getting as close as 4 kilometers and not be able to walk another step!

I’m now in the hotel lobby in Gent. The Sofitel has installed wifi access in the common areas of the ground floor in the hotel. The cost is 10 euros for 2 hours — that’s about $6.50 an hour, a pretty steep rate in my opinion. I’d like it a lot better if the access was available in my room, but this is certainly better than nothing. While I’m writing this I’m downloading a whole bunch of podcasts. I haven’t been able to access any of them since arriving in Belgium as this access is blocked from work for some dumb reason. I’ll make at least one more swipe at downloading podcasts for the flights back home on Wednesday. Some of the downloads are pretty slow from here. It looks like the bandwidth from the hotel out to the internet isn’t very large.