Brugge – Strasbourg

Since Brugge I’ve been cycling through my first hills in a month! Here’s the post to explain what I’ve seen!

Leaving Brugge I tried to make the most of the good cycling conditions, as I knew they wouldn’t last. Rather abruptly the separate cycle paths beside the busy roads stopped as I got into the French influenced part of Belgium.
Taking a break on a rare gravel road:

That said, I managed to find some nice routes on old railway lines, especially through the WWI memorials of Tyne Cot and towards Ypres.

Hmm, they didn’t rip up all the railway tracks!

I should point out that if you missed it I did a separate post on my visits to the WWI memorials. I think you should take a look at it here.

One thing I’ve been particularly alert to on the trip is the presence of NZ products in shops. In terms of outdoor gear there’s been a lot of Icebreaker and a brand of bike-rack called a Freeload. But I’ve also noticed a lot of NZ produce, as shown in this photo from a village near Passendale.
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So that day I rode on to Ypres (or Ieper (but not Leper)), past the Tyne Cot and Polygon Woods memorials. The Ypres Salient was site of big significance in WWI.
A lot of the city was destroyed, including the Cloth Hall, shown in the photo below. It was badly damaged, but has been amazingly restored.

Ypres is a nice town, and has a wall around it with a moat! As seen here by me riding out of town the next day.

I could tell I was getting close to France again by the resumption of baguettes in the bakeries! I’m back to having one strapped to the back of my bike as I ride. I’ve also learnt that my waterproof pants work well at keeping a baguette or two dry, but then you get rather wet legs!

This was a decent day of riding today, 132km including stops at quite a few memorials along the way. This was through the Somme, another important battlefield in WWI. The rolling hills were back, usually only 40-60 metres high, but enough to slow you down, especially after a month on the flat!
Along the roadside there have been patches of poppies growing wild. It makes a nice change, and they’re so much nicer for real instead of the plastic ones we have at ANZAC day.

That night I made it to a nice campsite in a small town beside the Somme river. I was only going to stay a night but when there was heavy rain on my tent the next morning I decided to stay put.
As I ride I listen to podcasts- like radio programmes on my iPod. One of them is a BBC History Magazine one and they had an interview with Antony Beevor about his new book The Second World War. I’ve read a few of his great books in the past- Stalingrad, D-Day and Berlin – and really recommend them if you want to learn more about WWII. As I’m going to be riding through Normandy soon, and was thinking about war a lot from the memorials I thought I’d buy it. It took less than a minute for me to find, buy and get the book delivered to my 3G Kindle ebook reader, in a tent in the rain in rural France. Pretty cool technology!
It’s been a great read so far and I really recommend it.

The next day of riding took me through lots of little towns, including Peronne, which has a big fortification with a WWI museum in it (and had a good market going on).

It started raining pretty soon after I started riding and kept up all day. This was the day I discovered my overtrou were good as baguette protectors.

I stayed that night at a campsite in the town of Laon (which got mentioned in the book I’m reading as I was there!). It was one of the better campgrounds I’ve stayed in in Europe solely because it had a shelter with picnic tables that I could dry out and cook in!

Of course just after dinner the rain stopped and the sky cleared- but not early enough for the sun to dry my stuff out very well. This is usually the case, grrr.

So the next day was a beautiful day- lots of blue sky with a few clouds to keep the temperature down.
It was a good mix of riding over rolling hills.

Some parts with open parts riding past lots of fields of cereals.

Sometimes along canals:

And sometimes through patches of trees.

I was riding through Champagne, although the vineyards were relatively limited in extent, maybe I was in the wrong part of the region. And no, I didn’t try any! My budget doesn’t stretch that far!

So it was generally a good day’s ride. I’d done about a hundred kilometres, and was looking forward to getting to the campground I knew was less than 20km further on. Then I heard a sound that takes a lot of the joy out a cyclists day- the hiss of a flat tire.
So I stopped, and got the tube out. This one was different to all the other flats I’ve had which are on the inside on the tube (caused by problems with the rim tape)- this was on the outside- the tire side. So I had a good look around the outside of the tire looking for something that might be poking in, a nail or something I hadn’t seen and had run over. But I couldn’t find anything. I ran my finger around the inside of the tire and noticed a something strange.. Turning the tire inside out I found a diagonal laceration, following the grain of the wire that the tire is made of. Looking further I found about 4 or 5 of these almost cuts around the tire, all regularly spaced. When I was in The Hague, Andrew from TravellingTwo mentioned that this had happened to their tires, so luckily it wasn’t too big a shock to me. I was still a bit worried as I’m not carrying a spare tire at the moment- being in Europe and figuring it’d be obvious when my tires were getting worn- I wasn’t expecting them the wear out from the inside out!
I’ve now duct-taped up the affected areas- I think it was the rubbing from the laceration rather than the lack of structural integrity or anything. At any rate the fix has lasted the last 200km of riding fine, but I’ll try and find some new tires in Strasbourg or Paris.
Here’s a couple of photos of it.

I stayed at another nice campground that night, with free wifi and a couple of beers I picked up at a nearby bakery.. There was a nice older Dutch guy was really well kitted out- his tent had a vestibule as big as my whole tent! He usually travels on a tandem with his wife, but she wasn’t keen on this trip, so he’d ridden all the way down to the Spanish border by himself and was now heading back home. He also had an item that gave me the biggest attack of gear envy I’ve had on the trip so far- he had a very cool little camp seat- something I’ve often wish I had (although I’m getting very comfortable at squatting with flat feet beside my cooker etc). The good one’s aren’t cheap though- often about 100NZD. I’m not sure if I can really justify carrying one through Asia, but I’ll probably look to pick one up in Australia before I do whatever riding I end up doing there.

Then followed the longest day of the trip so far- a 155km day along a bit of a canal then through rolling hills, in which I only saw fit to take two photos! Sorry about that- I’m just finding that this part of northern France isn’t very inspiring for me! So here they are! Oh, and on this day I hit the 5000km mark too, so that was pretty exciting!

That night was at a campsite with probably the best location so far- well away from the road (down a ridiculously steep road that I didn’t have to ride up thankfully), and beside a big calm canalised river.
There were two nice European cycle-tourists there, including one who had done two trips to NZ recently. He had a NZ flag sticker on his top tube and when I first saw it I got pretty excited that I’d come across another NZ cycle tourist, but not quite.
Here’s the view 5 metres from my tent. On the other side of the river there’s a cycle path that I followed to Nancy.

It was a flat ride along canals into Nancy. It ended up being about twice the distance compared to if I’d gone straight over the hills, but I had all day so I wasn’t rushed. Although they’re definitely not appealing to swim in!

This morning I took the train to Strasbourg to meet Yves, who I worked with in Antarctica on a gravity project.
It was a good day- we visited the University of Strasbourg that Yves works at, and caught up. In the evening we had a great dinner for Yves’ partner Miriam’s birthday (and one of their friends Robert, with his partner Yasuyo and their super-cute kid Kai!). And we’re just back from an adventurous bike-ride along the Maginot Line in the dark!

I’m staying here for a couple of nights then take the train back west to Paris (I was within a days ride of it several days ago).
After a few days in Paris I head on to the Normandy coast and the D-Day beaches before taking a ferry from Cherbourg to the south coast of England!