Погода: Гент, июнь

June in Bruges is unpredictable weather and predictable crowds. Regulars put the month anywhere from 12C to 28C, dry or very wet, and tell people to bring long sleeves, a coat and an umbrella regardless; our row's 20C reading as 19C with 9.7 precipitation days is the middling version. The crowd pattern is the useful part, because it runs on a timetable rather than a season: coaches, many of them from cruise ships, drop hundreds of people near Minnewater and give them about six hours, and the city transforms once the day-trippers have gone in the evening. Step a few streets off the obvious route and you are out of it even at midday. The record: 14.4C nights, 56.9mm of rain, 12.3 hours of sun and a 16.5-hour day.

Forum posters describe February in Belgium as similar to November - cold, wet and often bleak - though one visitor's specific trip reported it wasn't too cold and had no rain, just persistently gray skies without a single sunny stretch. Posters generally flag February as probably the single most likely month for snow, if any falls at all, in a typical Belgian winter. Posters comparing Ghent and Bruges as winter bases describe Ghent as more of a living, working city than the more overtly tourist-oriented Bruges, a distinction that shapes atmosphere more than weather. Posters generally rate February as cold, damp and gray for Ghent, workable with warm layers and the expectation that sunny days will be the exception rather than the rule.

Forum regulars call Belgian August weather genuinely hard to predict - it might hit 30C, or it might be 15C and raining, and posters are clear that rain poses a bigger risk to a trip than heat does. Early August gets a specific recommendation: many shops and restaurants close in late July, so the first couple weeks of August are quieter and pleasant, landing about two weeks after the huge, crowded Gentse Feesten festival (the third week of July). Crowds and tourism generally thin out as the month goes on, so late August offers a second, different kind of quiet window.