From 1999 (new post): Our group tour descends on Poperinge for the hop parade.

Editor's note: This weekend would have been the latest installment of the triennial Poperinge (Belgium) Beer and Hop Festival, but the pandemic postponed it, along with our trip. Consequently I'm living in the past and flooding the blog pages with reruns of past visits.

The first time I ever set foot in the Belgian city of Poperinge was 1998, a brief stop coinciding with my inaugural motorcoach-powered beer tour. There four other such group extravaganzas to follow before I retired from hosting in 2004.

As an aside, my 2004 retirement came in fits and starts. There were two further efforts to field an excursion, but both fell short of the farm-near-me/">minimum in terms of participants. I knew that if these were to continue, I'd have to up the ante in terms of my own performance, and decided to devote the time to the existing business instead.

The 1999 bus journey was the largest of them all, with 30 of us aboard, and one soon discovers that while greater numbers offer an economy of scale in terms of costs, they also reduce the chance of demonstrating the charms of an elusive back street specialty beer bar with only five tables.

In short, compromises are inevitable, and in the case of the 1999 tour, it quickly became clear to me that Poperinge didn't have a hotel capable of housing the group during the time of the triennial Beer and Hop Festival. Consequently, we stayed ten clicks down the road in the larger city of Ieper (Ypres) at a pleasant business traveler-oriented hotel near the industrial park.

For the hop fest itself, Luc Dequidt arranged a package that included group seating on the bleachers for the hop parade and passes into the German-style beer tent. I advised everyone about the local cafe and restaurant options, trusting they'd break up into smaller groups to explore, and they did.

Everyone was told the location of the motor coach and the deadline for returning to it, assuming they wanted a free ride back to Ieper. We had a long trip to Germany the following morning; hangovers could be nursed on the bus, because drivers must take breaks and cannot be worked beyond contractual limits.

I stressed this point. It also was the pre-Uber era, and while mobile phones existed, they were not common. Taxi service was available, if not optimum. Poperinge was, and remains, the last stop on a branch rail line through Ieper, and trains do not run very long into the evening.

Counting heads as we prepared to depart Poperinge, I saw that a few were missing. There was a fifteen-minute grace period, then we left for Ieper. My tour members were adults, and Poperinge a friendly, accommodating place.

What could go wrong?

Morning came, and it seemed everyone was accounted for. However, as I dug into a plate stacked high with the items from a fabulous breakfast buffet, one of the tour members approached me with a request. His son had flown into Brussels the previous day and joined us in Poperinge for parade. I knew Senior and Junior had connected; I ran into them several times while wandering the streets.

What I didn't know is that the son's commute from America to Europe had taken twice as long, sleeplessly, owing to flight cancellations and delays. Too many beers, not enough shut-eye, and perhaps a stray demon; he'd been involved in a bizarre fracas at the beer tent.

Poperinge authorities merely shrugged, scooped, and deposited Junior into the drunk tank for the night, all quite professional and polite, with instructions to his father as to when he'd be released in Poperinge next day -- this being precisely the same time the bus was scheduled to leave from Ieper.

Hence dad's request for a dispensation, and so of course we waited. It was only 45 minutes, and somewhat comical in the end considering the physical condition of the recently incarcerated. I'd planned on charging him a pro-rated fee for transportation, but decided to require that he buy the first round of beers in Germany, which he did.

I digitized just a few of the photos. I'll get around to the remainder someday.

From 2017: "Time for remembrance at Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery outside Poperinge."

I'm moody this week because the pandemic postponed Poperinge's Beer and Hop Festival, and so this week I'll be flooding the blog pages with reruns of past visits. As I've been saying for roughly 23 years, Poperinge is a great base of operations to explore numerous places of interest nearby, most of them accessible by bicycle. 

When the Great War began in 1914, Lijssenthoek was a small village near Poperinge, perched on the rail line to France.

Amid the stupendous carnage of the battles around Ieper (Ypres), which were renewed in various incarnations for four years, Lijssenthoek quickly became a place of great importance.

The rail line was the single most important Allied supply route, and a farm at Lijssenthoek was available for use as a field hospital and evacuation point. Most of the war, this vicinity was out of German artillery range.

For four years, trains arrived from France filled with healthy soldiers and supplies, and returned with wounded, but of course not all of the wounded survived, hence the military cemetery. Needless to say, it filled quickly. Today it is the second-largest Commonwealth cemetery in Belgium.

While most of the burials are British, Canadian and Australians, along with other troops from the British colonies, some Frenchmen and a handful of German troops also are buried at Lijssenthoek, as well as Chinese laborers. There is one American grave.

On Monday, Luc drove me to the cemetery. The village no longer exists, apart from a former pub building where the Englishman working as cemetery caretaker lived for many years.

At some point in the past the railroad tracks were torn out, and the N38 roadway built along the right-of-way. Because the N38 is the most direct route from Poperinge to France, it's the path we chose to bike in the direction of Cassel during those first two beercycling trips in 2000 and 2001.

However, we never stopped for a sag at the cemetery. Dozens of burial grounds dot the landscape around Ieper, and perhaps at some point a visitor no longer notices they're there.

If you ever go to Ieper and environs, take the time to stop and look at the graves. World War I knocked civilization off kilter. I'm not sure we've regained our balance, 100 years later.

This chart marks the daily number of burials in the cemetery. The highest points depicted here occurred almost exactly one hundred years ago at the time of my visit as a result of the Battle of Menin Road Ridge, itself one phase of the idiocy known to us as Passchendaele.

It was a battle that lasted three and a half months, achieved almost nothing, and resulted in 275,000 casualties under British command and 220,000 Germans.

Each day, the video screen in the comprehensive visitor's center focuses on one interment.

These are the faces of some of the 10,784 men (and one woman, a nurse named Nellie Spindler) buried at Lijssenthoek. Only 35 are unnamed. This is because if a soldier could be brought to the rear for medical attention, there was a much better chance of identification. Conversely, such was the horror of the Passchendaele battles that 90,000 bodies could not be identified, and 42,000 were never recovered.

The fence by the road outside is another artistic representation of the volume of burials.

Luc showed me the numeric mapping system enabling individual graves to be located easily. It's still in a book, not an app.

Gaps in the headstones usually indicate a burial moved to a different cemetery after war's end.

I was unaware of the reason for stones being placed atop the graves of Jewish soldiers.

All the explanations have one thing in common — the sense of solidity that stones give. Flowers are a good metaphor for life. Life withers; it fades like a flower. As Isaiah says, “All flesh is grass, and all its beauty like the flower of the field; grass withers and flowers fade” (Isaiah 40:6-7). For that reason, flowers are an apt symbol of passing.

But the memory is supposed to be lasting. While flowers may be a good metaphor for the brevity of life, stones seem better suited to the permanence of memory. Stones do not die.

Ironically, this is the (larger) Stone of Remembrance.

Members of the Chinese Labour Corps.

As for the remainder of the day on Monday, almost every eatery and watering hole in Poperinge was closed, although the shops were open. Diana and I went to the grocery and purchased sandwiches and salads for a day's meals in the apartment.

It was cool and rainy, and the city's workers gradually disassembled the festival infrastructure. The two of us read and rested.

At times, it's what you have to do.

From 2017: "TRAVEL PRELUDES: Ieper ... Ypres ... Wipers; the Great War and a passing of generations."

The Cloth Hall in Ieper (Ypres), with St. Martin's Cathedral behind it. Everything you see here was a hole in the ground in 1918. 

I'm being petulant because the pandemic postponed Poperinge's Beer and Hop Festival, and so this week I'll be flooding the blog pages with reruns of past visits. 

TRAVEL PRELUDES: Ieper ... Ypres ... Wipers; the Great War and a passing of generations.

The three segments of this decade-old documentary -- Geert Mak's In Europa ... "1915 Ieper" -- last only 40 minutes, but it's an invaluable introduction to the lasting impact of World War I. 

---

I'm trying not to read very much into this breathtakingly trite observation, but time has a way of passing.

Between 1998 and 2008, I traveled to Poperinge nine times, five of them with a bicycle as integral component of the itinerary. However, 2017 will mark only the second time back since 2008, and in the interim, much has changed in Pops and environs.

Well, duh -- and yet it's always amazing the way a human mind can remain stuck in self-enforced sepia, visualizing a milieu as it was, as though life itself wasn't dynamic and ever shifting.

Westhoek means "west corner" in Dutch, and as a region, Westhoek includes the areas around Poperinge, Ieper, Watou and Diksmuide. More so than the Middle Ages or Napoleon -- far more so than World War II -- these locales were profoundly impacted by almost four years of constant combat during the Great War.

In the year 2000 on the Monday of our first-ever bicycling adventure using Poperinge as a base, we rode to Ieper (ee-per). That's the Flemish version; it's Ypres in French and 'Wipers" to British soldiers during World War I. Barely a stone was left standing in Ieper at war's end. The whole city was rebuilt from the cellars up, and to this very day, tons of unexploded ordinance surface yearly.

On that first day in 2000, as we headed east from Poperinge, the French hills known as Trois Monts almost always could be seen rising on the horizon to the south, and although they aren’t particularly big, the flatness of Flanders magnifies their significance and one can readily understand their strategic importance in wartime.

The hills are why the Germans attacked in this direction. The Allies answered, and the result was years of devastating trench warfare stalemate. Just to the north, the Allied flank was secured only by a desperate expedient: the dikes near Diksmuide were breached and thousands of acres of farmland flooded to create a wall of water.

Our cycling journey took us past numerous Great War monuments and cemeteries of the British Commonwealth forces, whose final resting places attested to the global scale of the First World War: Irish, Australian, Canadian and Indian soldiers, buried alongside lads from Manchester and Newcastle. The resting places of Belgian, French and German soldiers also were seen.

Monday’s midday sag brought us to the center of the city, and a tale I've never forgotten. When the second world conflagration swept through Belgium, one young Ieper native resolved to escape. He made it somehow to the then-colony of Belgian Congo, and later to South Africa, where he enlisted in the British armed forces and fought against his country's German occupiers until 1945.

Afterward he returned to Ieper and founded a restaurant and pub, sold it, then opened another, called Ter Posterie for its location opposite the post office.

Ter Posterie was another classic Belgian cafe, with many dozens of bottled ales, a few more on draft, savory food and a comfortable outdoor terrace, where we sat and discussed our first half-day’s ride.

I never knew this man’s name, but nonetheless met him on three different occasions while enjoying the beer, food and hospitality at Ter Posterie. By 2000, active control of the business had long since passed to his daughter, although the old man still frequented the establishment.

Whenever he heard English being spoken, he'd amble over and spin his life story for the visitor in a narrative honed over thousands of ale-side retellings. Apparently we met him as he was descending into Alzheimer’s disease. During one visit on a quiet afternoon, perhaps in 2005, he could be heard howling somewhere to the rear, with harried family members rushing back and forth to care both for him and the cafe's guests.

At some point prior to 2009, he died, and later Ter Posterie closed.

In circuitous fashion, we return to the inevitability of change. I'm writing these words in advance of our actual visit to Poperinge and Haarlem (Netherlands), which I suspect will be a tad more elegiac than those stays in previous years.

In Poperinge, the triennial hop fest rolls merrily on. Luc is retired from the tourist office, and it's been almost ten years since Guy and Beatrice ran the Hotel Palace. It remains a viable business, just not the same for me as before.

In Watou, Chef Stefaan Couttenye's wife Sabine died a few years ago. She ran the front of the house at 't Hommelhof, and I worked with her twice when making arrangements for feeding my motorcoach groups.

I'd visited Poperinge prior to my period of obsession with bicycling, and for this reason my friends joined me in biking there for the first time in 2000, but there'd have been no biking without the encouragement and tutelage of the late Kevin Richards, who'll be very much on my mind as the parade unwinds in 2017. Glasses will be raised, repeatedly.

As you're watching the video prefacing these thoughts, remember that 100 years ago, there seemed to be no future for Westhoek. The people there persevered, and they built it back.

For me, returning to Poperinge will be like visiting old friends, albeit missing a few of them. All I can do is promise to remember them, and keep moving forward.

Time for remembrance at Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery outside Poperinge.

When the Great War began in 1914, Lijssenthoek was a small village near Poperinge, perched on the rail line to France.

Amid the stupendous carnage of the battles around Ieper (Ypres), which were renewed in various incarnations for four years, Lijssenthoek quickly became a place of great importance.

The rail line was the single most important Allied supply route, and a farm at Lijssenthoek was available for use as a field hospital and evacuation point. Most of the war, this vicinity was out of German artillery range.

For four years, trains arrived from France filled with healthy soldiers and supplies, and returned with wounded, but of course not all of the wounded survived, hence the military cemetery. Needless to say, it filled quickly. Today it is the second-largest Commonwealth cemetery in Belgium.

While most of the burials are British, Canadian and Australians, along with other troops from the British colonies, some Frenchmen and a handful of German troops also are buried at Lijssenthoek, as well as Chinese laborers. There is one American grave.

On Monday, Luc drove me to the cemetery. The village no longer exists, apart from a former pub building where the Englishman working as cemetery caretaker lived for many years.

At some point in the past the railroad tracks were torn out, and the N38 roadway built along the right-of-way. Because the N38 is the most direct route from Poperinge to France, it's the path we chose to bike in the direction of Cassel during those first two beercycling trips in 2000 and 2001.

However, we never stopped for a sag at the cemetery. Dozens of burial grounds dot the landscape around Ieper, and perhaps at some point a visitor no longer notices they're there.

If you ever go to Ieper and environs, take the time to stop and look at the graves. World War I knocked civilization off kilter. I'm not sure we've regained our balance, 100 years later.

This chart marks the daily number of burials in the cemetery. The highest points depicted here occurred almost exactly one hundred years ago at the time of my visit as a result of the Battle of Menin Road Ridge, itself one phase of the idiocy known to us as Passchendaele.

It was a battle that lasted three and a half months, achieved almost nothing, and resulted in 275,000 casualties under British command and 220,000 Germans.

Each day, the video screen in the comprehensive visitor's center focuses on one interment.

These are the faces of some of the 10,784 men (and one woman, a nurse named Nellie Spindler) buried at Lijssenthoek. Only 35 are unnamed. This is because if a soldier could be brought to the rear for medical attention, there was a much better chance of identification. Conversely, such was the horror of the Passchendaele battles that 90,000 bodies could not be identified, and 42,000 were never recovered.

The fence by the road outside is another artistic representation of the volume of burials.

Luc showed me the numeric mapping system enabling individual graves to be located easily. It's still in a book, not an app.

Gaps in the headstones usually indicate a burial moved to a different cemetery after war's end.

I was unaware of the reason for stones being placed atop the graves of Jewish soldiers.

All the explanations have one thing in common — the sense of solidity that stones give. Flowers are a good metaphor for life. Life withers; it fades like a flower. As Isaiah says, “All flesh is grass, and all its beauty like the flower of the field; grass withers and flowers fade” (Isaiah 40:6-7). For that reason, flowers are an apt symbol of passing.

But the memory is supposed to be lasting. While flowers may be a good metaphor for the brevity of life, stones seem better suited to the permanence of memory. Stones do not die.

Ironically, this is the (larger) Stone of Remembrance.

Members of the Chinese Labour Corps.

As for the remainder of the day on Monday, almost every eatery and watering hole in Poperinge was closed, although the shops were open. Diana and I went to the grocery and purchased sandwiches and salads for a day's meals in the apartment.

It was cool and rainy, and the city's workers gradually disassembled the festival infrastructure. The two of us read and rested. At times, it's what you have to do.

---

Previously:

The 2017 Poperinge Hop Parade, Part Two: The procession itself, and where to dine afterward.

TRAVEL PRELUDES: Ieper ... Ypres ... Wipers; the Great War and a passing of generations.

TRAVEL PRELUDES: Ieper ... Ypres ... Wipers; the Great War and a passing of generations.

The three segments of this decade-old documentary -- Geert Mak's In Europa ... "1915 Ieper" -- last only 40 minutes, but it's an invaluable introduction to the lasting impact of World War I. 

---

I'm trying not to read very much into this breathtakingly trite observation, but time has a way of passing.

Between 2000 and 2008, I traveled to Poperinge seven times, five of them with a bicycle as integral component of the itinerary. However, 2017 will mark only the second time back since 2008, and in the interim, much has changed in Pops and environs.

Well, duh -- and yet it's always amazing the way a human mind can remain stuck in self-enforced sepia, visualizing a milieu as it was, as though life itself wasn't dynamic and ever shifting.

Westhoek means "west corner" in Dutch, and as a region, Westhoek includes the areas around Poperinge, Ieper, Watou and Diksmuide. More so than the Middle Ages or Napoleon -- far more so than World War II -- these locales were profoundly impacted by almost four years of constant combat during the Great War.

In the year 2000 on the Monday of our first-ever bicycling adventure using Poperinge as a base, we rode to Ieper (ee-per). That's the Flemish version; it's Ypres in French and 'Wipers" to British soldiers during World War I. Barely a stone was left standing in Ieper at war's end. The whole city was rebuilt from the cellars up, and to this very day, tons of unexploded ordinance surface yearly.

On that first day in 2000, as we headed east from Poperinge, the French hills known as Trois Monts almost always could be seen rising on the horizon to the south, and although they aren’t particularly big, the flatness of Flanders magnifies their significance and one can readily understand their strategic importance in wartime.

The hills are why the Germans attacked in this direction. The Allies answered, and the result was years of devastating trench warfare stalemate. Just to the north, the Allied flank was secured only by a desperate expedient: the dikes near Diksmuide were breached and thousands of acres of farmland flooded to create a wall of water.

Our cycling journey took us past numerous Great War monuments and cemeteries of the British Commonwealth forces, whose final resting places attested to the global scale of the First World War: Irish, Australian, Canadian and Indian soldiers, buried alongside lads from Manchester and Newcastle. The resting places of Belgian, French and German soldiers also were seen.

Monday’s midday sag brought us to the center of the city, and a tale I've never forgotten. When the second world conflagration swept through Belgium, one young Ieper native resolved to escape. He made it somehow to the then-colony of Belgian Congo, and later to South Africa, where he enlisted in the British armed forces and fought against his country's German occupiers until 1945.

Afterward he returned to Ieper and founded a restaurant and pub, sold it, then opened another, called Ter Posterie for its location opposite the post office.

Ter Posterie was another classic Belgian cafe, with many dozens of bottled ales, a few more on draft, savory food and a comfortable outdoor terrace, where we sat and discussed our first half-day’s ride.

I never knew this man’s name, but nonetheless met him on three different occasions while enjoying the beer, food and hospitality at Ter Posterie. By 2000, active control of the business had long since passed to his daughter, although the old man still frequented the establishment.

Whenever he heard English being spoken, he'd amble over and spin his life story for the visitor in a narrative honed over thousands of ale-side retellings. Apparently we met him as he was descending into Alzheimer’s disease. During one visit on a quiet afternoon, perhaps in 2005, he could be heard howling somewhere to the rear, with harried family members rushing back and forth to care both for him and the cafe's guests.

At some point prior to 2009, he died, and later Ter Posterie closed.

In circuitous fashion, we return to the inevitability of change. I'm writing these words in advance of our actual visit to Poperinge and Haarlem (Netherlands), which I suspect will be a tad more elegiac than those stays in previous years.

In Poperinge, the triennial hop fest rolls merrily on. Luc is retired from the tourist office, and it's been almost ten years since Guy and Beatrice ran the Hotel Palace. It remains a viable business, just not the same for me as before.

In Watou, Chef Stefaan Couttenye's wife Sabine died a few years ago. She ran the front of the house at 't Hommelhof, and I worked with her twice when making arrangements for feeding my motorcoach groups.

I'd visited Poperinge prior to my period of obsession with bicycling, and for this reason my friends joined me in biking there for the first time in 2000, but there'd have been no biking without the encouragement and tutelage of the late Kevin Richards, who'll be very much on my mind as the parade unwinds in 2017. Glasses will be raised, repeatedly.

As you're watching the video prefacing these thoughts, remember that 100 years ago, there seemed to be no future for Westhoek. The people there persevered, and they built it back.

For me, returning to Poperinge will be like visiting old friends, albeit missing a few of them. All I can do is promise to remember them, and keep moving forward.

Shells still explode in Belgium, one hundred years on.

In 2002, I hired a battlefield guide for my beer tour group. We were staying in Ypres (Ieper) and attending the hop festival in nearby Poperinge. The guide's explanation of unexploded ordinance recovery (and periodic explosions) almost a century after the fact paralleled this one, and I'll never forget it.

Now it's actually been a century.

Belgians Share Their Land With War’s Reminders; A century after hundreds of thousands died around Ypres, their remains are still being found, and shells are still exploding, by Suzanne Daley (NYT)

YPRES, Belgium — The padlocked cage beside the driveway on the Butaye family farm near this town in western Belgium is almost full of rusting bombs again. Since January, Stijn Butaye has collected 46 mortar shells on his family’s 100 acres, World War I munitions he found among the sugar beet and potato fields, sometimes with the help of his metal detector.

Mr. Butaye’s father, Luc, won’t even plow two of his fields for fear of what the blades might hit. Not long ago, a neighbor riding his tractor ruptured an aging shell, and the explosion sent shrapnel through his windshield, tearing off a chunk of his ear.

“You don’t know what could happen,” said Stijn Butaye, 26, who has built a small museum beside the barn with hundreds of items — including shoes and eyeglasses and razors and a perfectly preserved gas mask — that he has found on his family’s property. “We just use that land for grazing the cows.”