Part 1 of a recent 4 day road trip across France, Belgium and Holland / The Netherlands.
Stopped off at Bruges firstly to get some fuel for the van but mostly so i could say i was “in Bruges”, then onto Brussels to visit the Atomium Building, built for the 1958 expo world fair and originally was supposed to be a temporary 6 month installation it still stands strong after over 50 years, the Atomium its self it has nine steel spheres connected so that the whole forms the shape of a unit cell of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times and is situated in Heysel park just across the road from the Heysel football stadium.
To give and idea on the size of this for those of you that are local reading this the Height of the Atomium is 102 meters which is the same height as the spinnaker tower viewing deck give or take a few cms, however the main difference is that the Atomium is also nearly the same width as it is high thus in size dwarfing the Spinnaker tower.
Other random specs:
The spheres have a diameter of 59.0 ft. (2 buses)
The diagonal tubes are 75.4 ft. long and of 10.8 ft. diameter
The escalators installed inside the tubes of the Atomium are amongst the longest in Europe. The largest is 114.8 ft. long. They can take 3,000 persons per hour.
The elevator speed – the highest in Europe – is 16.4 ft./sec. It takes visitors up to the top sphere in 23 seconds and its capacity if 22 persons.

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