The sun came out at nine, and with it, the saxophones. I was on the Croisette promenade, coffee in hand from Café de la Croisette, when the first notes drifted down from the bridge. It's the final Sunday of Mister Sax's Musical Sundays, the roaming band thing they do all summer, and the whole town was out for it. The light on the Meuse was doing that thing where the cliff looks gold, and the Collegiate Church bells were just starting. I'd planned to do paperwork today. I did not do paperwork today.
Here's the thing about Dinant on a Sunday in late August. The day-trippers have thinned out, the kayak season is running again after that long drought closure, and the town feels like it's exhaling. The saxophone bands play from one to four — roaming sets along the promenade, up through the Saint-Nicolas quarter, even out to the little streets behind the church. I followed them for a while, past the souvenir stalls and the stands selling couques de Dinant. Those honey biscuits are about two-fifty to four euros a piece, and they're basically architectural. Hard as a rock. You don't eat them so much as commit to them.
I stopped at Solbrun for a second coffee around ten. It's a tiny roastery place on the main drag, the kind of spot that's easy to walk past, and it was doing a steady trade in people who'd been woken up by brass instruments. I got a seat by the window, and I watched the saxophone players tuning up on the square. There were maybe eight of them, all ages, and one woman who looked about seventy playing a baritone sax the size of a small dog. The coffee was about three euros. I could have stayed there all morning, but I had a date with the Citadelle.
I'd been up the Citadel twice before — once by cable car, once on the 408 steps, but I hadn't done the augmented reality tour yet. They added the HistoPad thing last year, and it's a whole different way of seeing the place. You get a tablet at the entrance — it's bundled into the twelve-euro ticket, which is about right for what you get — and you hold it up over the rooms and the fortifications, and it layers the history onto the stone. I saw Dinant in the 1400s, the workshops, the copper trade that made this town famous. Then I saw it in August 1914, and the tablet went quiet. There are some things with no overlay.
The Citadelle sits on that cliff above the town, and from the top you can see the whole curve of the Meuse, the Collegiate Church with its onion dome, the Rocher Bayard split down the middle, and the rooftops stacked like a staircase. It cost me twelve euros for the entry, and you can add the cable car for a combo that runs about ten to twenty-two depending on the day. I did the steps down instead — all 408 of them — because there's a particular kind of masochism that feels like exercise, and because the view gets better with every landing. By the time I got to the bottom, my legs were making polite suggestions about lunch.
I ate at Tout Simplement, which is a small, serious bistro just off the main square. The lunch formula was about eighteen to twenty-two euros — a starter and a main, or a main and a dessert, depending on the day. I had the flamiche, because you have to, and it was exactly right. Leek and cheese and pastry, done properly, with the kind of golden top that makes you want to applaud. A draught Leffe to go with it was about four euros, and it came cold and blonde and entirely local. That's the thing about Dinant — the abbey that first brewed Leffe is just up the road, so you're drinking about eight hundred years of river valley in a glass.
The afternoon was given over to the saxophones again. They'd moved down to the promenade by the Charles de Gaulle Bridge — the one with the saxophone sculptures on it, one for each note of the scale, each decorated by a different artist. I'd walked the bridge before, but on a Sunday with a band playing at both ends and families out in the sun, it felt like the town's true version of itself. I sat on a bench and watched for a while. The sax is a strange thing to be a town's symbol — it's young, barely 180 years old, and it was invented by a local kid named Adolphe Sax who basically hit the patent office like it was a deadline. The Maison de Monsieur Sax, his birthplace, is free, and I'd already done the full tour the other day. But I still like being on the bridge, where the whole thing is commemorated in bronze and the music is live and free.
I stopped at Marie-Charlotte la cafet' for a late-afternoon coffee, mostly because I'd walked past it three times and it looked like the kind of place where the cake is always fresh. It's just off the main route, not far from the Notre-Dame, and they do a decent espresso for about three euros. I sat outside and watched the swallows work the river. There were kayaks coming back up from Anseremme, and a river boat doing its slow turn. Somewhere on the Lesse, people were paddling past Château Walzin, which I'd seen from the water yesterday when the river reopened for the first time in 44 days. The drought had shut the Lesse to kayaking since July 9, and the reopening on the 22nd was the big local relief story. I'd done the Gendron to Anseremme run myself, twelve kilometres of river and cliff and castle, and it was as good as promised. If you're planning a trip, that's the classic one. Book it through Dinant Évasion or one of the outfits on the riverside.
Here's a practical thought. If you're coming to Belgium for a week or two, the easy stuff is an eSIM on arrival or a prepaid SIM from a store — Proximus and Orange have outlets in most towns, and a pay-as-you-go plan is plenty for maps and messaging. The national transit card is the MoBIB card, about six euros from any SNCB station counter, and it holds train and bus tickets across the whole country. The train from Dinant to Brussels runs about hourly and takes about ninety minutes. It's not the fastest line in the world, but the Meuse valley views are a solid trade.
The thing that's been on my mind all week, though, is housing. I've been looking for a permanent flat while I travel south — the plan is to end up somewhere along the Meuse and call it home for a while. Rent in Dinant runs about six-seventy to seven-ninety for a modest one-bedroom, with the median around eight-seventy. That's less than Brussels by a noticeable margin. I had seen a listing for a place in Bouvignes-sur-Meuse, the old rival town across the river, which used to be a serious medieval copper-working centre until Dinant sacked it, or vice versa depending on which century you ask. The flat was a ground-floor thing with a garden and a view of the Citadelle from the back. I'd been meaning to walk over and look at the street, just to get a feel for the neighbourhood before I called the agent.
So at about five, I crossed the river. Bouvignes is quiet on a Sunday — the kind of quiet where you can hear a door close from three houses down. There's a riverside path, some old stone houses, and the ruins of a castle up on the hill that the town is slowly restoring. I found the building, which is all pale brick and green shutters, and I stood outside it like a very obvious private investigator. The street was calm, with a bakery at the end that I'd bet real money does good bread. I didn't knock — it's rented, and I was just checking the area. But it felt right. The kind of place you'd wake up in and hear the river.
Dinner was at La planche des saveurs, a charcuterie-and-cheese place near the Tourist Office that does boards of things you can't quite name but definitely want. I had the mixed plate, which cost about thirty-five to forty-five euros for a proper meal when you factor in a Leffe and a coffee, and it came loaded with local hams, cheeses from the Ardennes, and pickles that made my mouth pucker pleasantly. The room is small — maybe fifteen seats — and on a Sunday night it was full of locals and a few quiet visitors. I took my time. Outside, the sky was doing that long, golden thing that means summer is starting to negotiate with autumn.
After dinner I walked back along the Croisette and stopped at the foot of the Citadelle, which was lit up against the dark cliff. There was a Diana Baroni concert in town tonight — part of the Festival de l'Été Mosan, which is apparently celebrating its fiftieth edition this year. I'm told it's a whole series of shows in heritage sites along the Meuse, and the 23rd was the Dinant date. I didn't go — I'd had a long day and the saxophones had been my music — but I heard the tail end of something drifting down from the church, and it sounded beautiful.
I sat on a bench by the water for a while with the last of the day. A river boat was tying up, and a few people were fishing off the far bank. There was a couple on the bridge taking photos of each other with the lit-up cliff behind them, and they looked happy in that uncomplicated way that travel does to you. I thought about Adolphe Sax again, and about how this town keeps getting knocked down and rebuilding. The August 1914 massacre took six-hundred-seventy-four of its people, and the town came back. The drought closed the river, and the river came back. The Couques de Dinant are literally inedible without a hammer, and they're still a bestseller. There's a stubbornness to this place that I admire.
Tomorrow is Monday, and Monday means bureaucracy. There's a mutualité to sign up for, the health insurance thing that Belgium requires, and I've been putting it off because the forms are in French and my Belgian paperwork brain is still at about seventy percent. The administration communale in Dinant is near the Hôtel de Ville, and the Service des Étrangers handles the longer-term registration for anyone staying past the 90-day Schengen window. For most visitors, the 90-in-180 rule is what matters. For me, it's a matter of getting the electronic residence card sorted before September gets away from me.
All of it, though, can wait until the morning. I walked back to my room with the river to my right and the cliff to my left, and I had that rare feeling that I've done exactly the right amount of nothing. Dinant in the golden hour is a good place to be alive. The church bells rang nine, and I didn't count them. I just listened.
Everything I've mentioned — the kayak booking, the Citadelle tickets, the eSIM, the MoBIB card, that flat in Bouvignes — is in the episode notes. Tonight, I'm going to sleep with the window open and the river doing its quiet work below. Bonsoir from Dinant.