Hilly & Gravely - Day 2

Route: Ede - Hoenderloo - Wolfheze
Distance: 84 km
Elevation: 485 m
Duration: 4:29 h
Weather: very sunny but cold, 8 C

Today started very close to the center of the Netherlands!

And from there the day took a turn for the better. Cycling through forests and heathers (although without flowers… who knows when those things are flowering?)

On this log in the sun I had my second breakfast … 

… and shortly after I even found this dixi in the middle of the nature…

… not too far actually from my lunch (pannekoeken). Because in this area of the Hoge Velowe there aren’t a lot of villages nor a lot of places to eat. So Hoenderloo was the obvious place where to have lunch. And  actually I arrived there just before 13:00, so also good timing. I even had time to dial in for a few minutes to a zoom call, that my Tokyo cycling friends has organized and saw a few of them. Hoping to see them in person in the next months! 

After lunch the hills waited, but actually it wasn’t as strenuous s as I had feared. Somehow yesterday seemed harder. Although today I actually made a bit more elevation. Not hugely more though. 

I actually don’t have any photo of a hill, so you need to take the Strava data as proof. Instead I have pictures of flat landscapes:

Partially the ride came through an area where I had organized a 2 day ride last year summer. 

Today I passed the same old radio station a bit farther in the distance:

In summer there were also everywhere these beautiful but deadly flowers. Today no risk to be killed by a flower. 

Hilly & Gravely - Day 1

Route: Utrecht - Austerlitz - Rehnen- Ede
Distance: 83 km
Elevation: 397 m
Duration: 4:39 h
Weather: sun and clouds, 8 C

After a long time of only riding around Leiden (albeit quite big loops), I saw that this weekend weather was going to be really nice (well, for being February always) I decided to do a 3 day trip a bit farther away and in a landscape different from the normal polders around Leiden/Amsterdam.

I knew that behind Utrecht there is the Utrechtse Heuvelrug, a hilly area, but I actually never had been there. So goal for today! 

I didn’t start though in Leiden, but got the train to Utrecht, otherwise it would have been too far to enjoy the hilly part.

The first stop was a pyramid! In Austerlitz! 

But as you can see, it isn’t a “real” pyramid, nor OS this THE Austerlitz, which Google just told me is somewhere in the Austrian K&K empire. 

But well, the village closeby was actually named after the original Austerlitz, when it was founded by the French, so yes, there is some connection. 

Until here my way was in the forest, but mainly along normal roads, but quite soon after I entered into the Heuvelrug proper and had a very nice, winding way with very light gravel.

And yes, there was a bit of up and down. Nothing too steep, this is still the Netherlands, but not as flat as around Leiden. 

For being February there were a good number of other cyclists around. So I can understand the warning in Komoot that in summer this park can be too busy with too many cyclists at different speed to be enjoyable to the faster ones. But today that was no problem.

Actually I had put the ride into Meetup in case someone wanted to come along, but somehow a 80 km +, 400 m day in February didn’t sound attractive to other people on Meetup. Who knows why?

I for my part can’t complain, but it is also true that I feel my legs way more than after a 80 km flat ride. Probably the added weight of the overnight bag doesn’t help either.

For the night I am staying in a hotel run by the Salvation Army, which however feels (and looks) like any normal hotel, with the exception that they ban alcohol and cigarettes. 

Dinner was quite nice, definitely better than in many other Dutch places.

TdE - Day 36 Martelange - La Roche en Ardennes

Route: Martelange - Bastogne - La Roche en Ardennes 
Distance: 72 km
Elevation: 537 m
Duration: 4:19 h
Weather: sunny but not too hot, 19 C

Today right into the Ardennes, and well, I have to admit they are very nice indeed!

Actually much nicer than the picture above. I wasn’t very capable of converting the nice landscape also in nice pictures. Probably the nicest valley was the one just leasing into La Roche en Ardennes. 

My hotel tonight was on the top of a very steep hill, and even after breakfast the clouds were still hanging low in the fields. 

So the day started with a steep descent back into the valley where I would rejoin EuroVelo 5 route. In contract to Luxembourg here in Belgium the route is very well indicated. 

Nevertheless the first 15 or so km were a bit hard, not because of any incline/descent but because of the road surface. (I actually didn’t take a picture of the worst parts of the path, were it was covers in huge rocks and I had to push the bike)

When I finally hit asphalt again, it was the smoothest tarmac ever! Such a beauty:

And actually for Belgium this was so far the best tarmac, as a lot of the smaller streets are a bit deteriorated. But more about that in a future post. 

I had planned my first stop of the day in Bastogne, at about 25 km. I am always planning ahead where are bakeries or restaurants so not to run out of calories (and rest stops). Bastogne was at a great distance as a first stop. What I didn’t know that the would be a cycling race (probably of under 19s) starting in the center of Bastogne shortly after I arrived. When I first came into the city on an other one of these rather uncompacted gravel roads, I noticed a lot of cyclists in team gear. I thought that maybe some teams are training there, but actually it was the last few minutes before their race. So I witnessed the “depart fictif” …

Within minutes of the depart everyone, all the team cars had left and I went to a local bakery which had been my objective for even going into town and got myself a tartlet and a huge baguette. It turns out that in Belgium baguettes (ie sandwiches) are prepared at the moment instead of already lying around since hours waiting for someone who wasn’t exactly this kind of sandwich. The one I had prepared was with salmon and really good (and enormous, although I had taken the smaller one). 

On through the rolling terrain and small villages where many people were busy mowing their lawn or cutting too precision their hedges, both seem to be a Belgian obsession. 

My accommodation for tonight was in La Roche en Ardennes, a small town I had never heard of before, but which seems to be THE center of an outdoor activities in the Ardennes. Coming to my hotel I did cross some incredibly dirty MTB riders (all male I think), and down at the river, there were lots of kayaks waiting for the next day. 

However for being a Saturday with really nice weather there weren’t a lot of cyclists on my route today. I am on an official EuroVelo route, but nevertheless I meet maybe 1 or 2 other long distance riders per day. So different from the Danube or the Altmühl where it was sometimes even too much to greet all of them. Not only cyclotourists were missing, even just plain normal cyclists weren’t around either. Until hitting La Roche, where all the MTB guys were rolling around.

I was lucky that I still got a room at La Roche, as it seemed to be very popular. Most of my bookings I do though Booking.com, but they had nothing available for this town, so I searched on Google maps and mailed a few of the hotels and only one answered with some availability. But it was nice enough. An old, big hotel overlooking the valley. 

In the late afternoon/evening I went down into the village, which is spotted with tanks from the offensive of the Ardennes. (One of them actually right in front of my hotel.) 

But the village itself is quite nice. 

TdE - Day 28 Donaueschingen - Umkirch

Route: Donaueschingen - Black Forest - Umkirch
Distance: 74 km
Elevation: 705 m
Duration: 4:32
Weather; cloudy , a little bit of sun, but no rain, 20 C 

Today was probably the day where I climbed the highest mountain I ever climbed with a bicycle. Luckily already Donaueschingen is pretty high, so it wasn’t that crazy amount of climbing too reach over 1,000 meter above sea level. But still, pretty proud of my achievement and the views I was recompensed with:

The climbing started straight away from the hotel and also very quickly the region becomes very sparsely populated. The route today I had planned entirely with Komoot as I hadn’t found any official cycling path crossing the Black Forest at this angle, but while riding I was always at the lookout for cycling signs and if I found one that went into my direction I changed to that option instead of my planned route. 

This also brought my to this straight, maybe 10 km long, gravel path through the forest. Very lonely there…although I did encounter one woman doing Nordic walking.

I took the climb slowly and after a while I found a nice bench and had a pear I had bought about a week ago in Wellheim! It was nicely juicy, exactly what I needed.

Although the temperature has gone down compared to the heat a few days ago, all that climbing still made me quite thirsty, and I quickly finished my first bottle of water. But I have always 2 bottles, plus this time I bought an extra bottle of sweet ice tea as well. But when bottle 1 gets empty a slight panic sets in searching for a source of water. Which in retrospect yesterday was totally unnecessary, but well, that is the benefit of hindsight. I was really quite afraid of not meeting another soul for the entire day and even was quite worried if I would be able to find something to eat. 

When I planned the ride yesterday I checked restaurants  on the route and did find some, but many were closed in the day, or only item on the weekend. But I saw 2 that should have been open. So they were my goal for lunch. I even planned an alternative route and reserved and alternative hotel in Titisee just in case I was not able to find anything to eat, or the weather would turn to the worse. Talking about the weather, the forecast again was much worse than reality. Per the forecast it should have drilled all morning and there was even the distinct possibility of a thunderstorm! Nothing of this came true and specially on the decent I was very relieved that the roads weren’t wet. 

When I emerged from the long forest road there was a very tiny village, but with a production plant for some engineering. Very archetypical of Baden Württemberg! There I found a worker and asked him for a refill of my bottle. 

Not too much later I came to the highest point of my cycling trip (and I guess it will stay the highest point for a long time), 1040 m! And right there at the mountain station of a small T-bar lift I had lunch in the first restaurant that per my search should have been and actually was open!

After lunch the first, not long decent started, and I noticed that descending isn’t that much fun either if it is too steep. I was essentially on the breaks the WHOLE time! Sometimes I looked at the speed on Garmin, and I was kind of going at 20 km/h okay and when it got up to 30 km/h that was really the maximum I could live with. So my admiration of professional cyclists who decent at 80, 90, 100 km/h had grown a lot. And also all the non professional cyclists who would be laughing about my attempts to get down a mountain. It just feels very sketchy to decent on two small wheels a road that is only going down and down. 

This first decent wasn’t too long and so there was a bit more climbing to be done, but quite gentle. And with nice, typical Black Forest farmhouses dotted across the hillside. 

Today and yesterday were also one of the few days were I saw cows grazing outside. Such a normal view in the Netherlands, in Germany it seems that most cows are indoor dwellers and the fields are only used to grow crops. But here in the Black Forest the hillside is too steep and probably the ground not fertile enough, so that there is only grass for cows too munch on:

After this second, shorter ascent the final descend started and my hands are hurting from all the breaking. It was also interesting to feel that once down in the valley that then leads to Freiburg the temperature went up quite remarkably. 

I didn’t stop in Freiburg as I know the city and my hotel is outside. Also I couldn’t really have parked my bike safely in such a big city. 

In the evening I tried to clean a bit the bike from all the dust it has accumulated over the strade bianche of the Danube valley. 

Tomorrow onto country # 5, France! 

TdE - Day 10-16 Bad Homburg

Routes: in and around Bad Homburg 

Walking: 44 km

Cycling: 17 km
Weather: Getting colder, generally cloudy, but not that much rain as the weather announcers promised 

This last week a welcome break at my parents house, with a washing machine, my mothers cooking, late starts, some shopping and a lot of walking.

As on the bike I only bring one “off bike” set of clothes I had shipped a small parcel to my parents with more normal clothes. 

On the Monday (TdE Day 10) my mother wanted to go shopping for her, and we found 3 very nice dresses here in Bad Homburg for her which she has been wearing ever since. And I also found a nice dress for me. 

The next day (TdE Day 11) we wanted to do some hiking and took the city bus up to Saalburg, an ancient Roman fortress, which however this time we didn’t visit (we went there with Matteo only a few weeks ago). Instead we hiked over to Hessenpark, an open air museum and then back. On the way out we got slightly lost in the forest, not really lost but didn’t find the most logical way, so when we arrived at the Hessenpark we were hungry. Since the 23/August the “3G rule” applies which in German stands for vaccinated, recovered or tested (geimpft, genesen, getestet) when visiting an indoor location or a restaurant. In some places they just ask in others they duly check at the entrance. At Hessenpark they checked in detail, but we were all in the “geimpft” (vaccinated) category and could proof it, so had no problems. 

After lunch we hiked back taking a slightly different path and this time following an officially indicated hiking path, which came by this newly created pond complete with a bench, where we observed a caterpillar  crawling up and down the table in front of us, apparently without a clear idea where he actually wanted to go. We couldn’t help either. 

In the evening Matteo came for one night and on Wednesday (TdE Day 12) we made a trip together to the newly built “Altstadt” (old town) of Frankfurt. Scenic it is, and for sure nicer than the ugly post war city hall that was occupying that space before. 

We had lunch together and then Matteo departed while we went for some long planned shopping in the city. Due to Covid-19 my parents weren’t in Frankfurt for over a year, maybe even 2 years. Not that they were going to Frankfurt frequently before then either, but since Covid they avoided to take public transport plus most shops were closed for a long time. Nevertheless the shopping list of my mother wasn’t that long either and we managed to get everything in a single street and then had cake in the same street as well before returning home by commuter train. I was surprised how much the busy city center of Frankfurt did stress me out. Living 4 years now in small Leiden and never going to Amsterdam has had an effect. And we’ll, Tokyo or Osaka is just not the same stress level (for me) as a busy European town. Maybe the fact that we needed to look constantly not to loose my father was also an additional stress factor. He orientates himself well in Bad Homburg in areas where he always is, but he wouldn’t be able any longer to orientate himself in Frankfurt or be capable of taking some actions to get back home. 

On Thursday (TdE Day 13) my mother wanted some time at home, I wanted to do some bicycle related shopping, so I took my father along on a bike ride that would bring us midway through to a huge bicycle shop. Actually the same bicycle shop where I bought a lot of equipment for my 2 month ride through Japan 4 years ago. This time I got a new helmet (same model as before as I find it quite comfortable) and a pump, as the old one at my parents place was loosing more air than putting in the tubes.

In the afternoon the weather was still fine (although the weather forecast was warning since days that it would like early autumn and rainy), so all 3 of us went for a walk through the park. Heidi and I each wearing one blue and white shoe as she has two identical pairs of barefoot shoes. (We we’re also wearing our new blue dresses bought on Monday).

We also admired a lot an electric substation that recently got painted as if it were a small temple. The “background” is actually the real background that would be visible if the substation didn’t block the view.

On Friday (TdE Day 14) we had an appointment at a restaurant at Saalburg where my parents first met and where they now 52 years later will celebrate their Golden wedding anniversary. Now it was only the organization what menu to choose, where the table will be… As the appointment was at 11:30 it was too early for us to have lunch right away, so we hiked instead to Herzberg (“heart mountain”) and had lunch there. My parents already told me, but really nearly all the thick forest that once covered the entire hike between Saalburg and Herzberg had gone. Fallen victim to a hurricane and the destructive forces of the bark beetle. 

As it was rather cold that day, all the sun was actually quite welcome but if you are expecting to hike in a nice, lush forest away from the heat, you are up for a big disappointment. 

Yesterday (TdE Day 15) we stayed in Bad Homburg and had a look at the extremely low key edition of the Laternenfest (“lantern festival”). In normal times THE festival of my home town, but this year a quite depressive affair. 

And no, this picture was NOT taken when it was still closed.

And finally today (TdE Day 16) we hardly moved, but we did go down to the nearest park where a traditional dog racing event was held. Although I am afraid of dogs, I do remember it fondly of my childhood days. 

And it was funny again. The best scene being one of these dogs deciding mid race, to take a poop. 

In the afternoon I helped my father to write the text for the invites to their Golden wedding anniversary and packed everything for departure tomorrow. 

 

TdE Day 2 Fietsen door bomen & water (Hilvarenbeek - Diepenbeek)

Route: Hilvarenbeek - Postel - Fietsen door bomen - door water - Diepenbeek 
Distance: 104 km

Elevation: 154 m
Duration: 5:13
Average speed: 18.8 km/h
Weather: sunny and quite hot, 26C

Today in the morning I woke up to my cycling shirt drying gently in the air.

Mukesh might be able to trek for days on end through the Himalaya, but cycling 120 km in the flat of the Netherlands didn’t do any good to his knee. Admittedly it was his first 120 km. So he decided to do the responsible thing and to stay close to train lines where he could return when needed. So he headed back to Tilburg and then on to Den Bosch and finally to Utrecht. In the end he pretty much did the same km as I did, but less than what he would have needed if he had had to go to Maastricht. 

I in turn did continue South. Overall the day saw a lot of forests. And this was a blessing as again it was quite hot, so the shade was very welcome. Already a few km after the start I turned into the forest of Landgoed de Utrecht. 

And a bit later I was cycling on this beech avenue. 

After 20 km I crossed my first international border into Belgium.

In Belgium pretty soon I got onto this Kanal which was nicely in the shades of big trees. Unfortunately after several kilometers the way was blocked and a detour was indicated.

The detour nearly, nearly brought me back to the Netherlands, but I managed to stay on the right side of the road.

Checking the detour I recognize that I didn’t need to follow the entire detour, but could shorten the ride a little bit. This also brought me too the small village of Postel, which seems to be a huge tourist magnet. I don’t really know why there were so many people, but definitely there were a lot of Harley Davidson and other motorcycle riders. There were also several restaurants and stalls with french fries (well I guess they are called BELGIAN fries here!). But I took something sweet at what seemed to be a very famous bakery. Even had a small queue building up outsid of people who came to buy bread.

This was a welcome break. 

From Postel I continues on a normal road which had something like a cycle path attached to it, but at least from my spoiled Dutch background, not a very good one. Kind of cycling in the ditch parallel to the road and with car drivers thinking that as the cyclist is beyond a white line , that line would be sufficient to protect the cyclist from any harm of passing cars. Anyway, it wasn’t soooo bad and luckily quite soon I rejoined my originally planned route, which followed some very quiet canals in the forests.

When my water supplies started to run low, which really means for me that bottle number 1 is getting nearly empty (because I am a real water addict and mightily fear running out) I turned into a very small village along the way and found a nice lady who refilled my bottle. Alternatively there were however some “Biergarten” along the way as well.

My next break I want to take at around 50 km and just before the “Fietsen door bomen” I found a steakhouse. Although steakhouse isn’t really a good description for this magically very peaceful and quiet garden restaurant. I didn’t want to have a steak for lunch with the heat and the other 40 to 50 km to cycle. But a carpaccio and a small salad were ideal.

Well rested and a bit cooled down I came to my first official highlight of the day (although one has to admit that riding along the canals was already great. They seem to be less used, less well maintained than in The Netherlands which makes that they have lusher vegetation around or so it seemed.) Anyway, the first official highlight of the day what is this bridge construction in the middle of a forest that allows cyclists or pedestrians to get to the top of the canopy and then rush down again. “Fietsen door de bomen”: 

 

The first time I did it slowly, stopping for pictures. The second time in one go to enjoy breezing through the trees up and down. Very gentle slope indeed. 

In Wijchmaal I hit a cycling road through the more forest and followed it for 20 km. The cycling road actually is even longer, maybe 40 km. 

Along the way and right about the 75 km marker there was an other very relaxing cafe in the forest on the way, where I stopped for a homemade lemonade and a rhubarb cake. 

At the place where we finally left that cycle way, there was even some blooming heath: 

Admittedly I didn’t manage to capture it nicely. Essentially because it was a bit off limits for cyclists. 

Not too much later, and only 10 km from my accommodation for tonight, I reached the second official highlight of the day: “Fietsen door het water”

I had been here before (I think in 2019) with Matteo and a friend, but - crucially- without a bicycle.  On foot! Which actually was okay as well. 

From there it wasn’t too far to my B&B of the night in the nondescript village of Diepenbeek. One thing I noticed yesterday in Belgium is the lack of welcoming front gardens. Many people have big gardens in front of the house, but either just fill them up with pebble stones, or an often well manicured lawn, however without any flowers, trees or other vegetation. 

Compare that to houses in The Netherlands which often have very lush gardens, like this excellent specimen from Bilderdam: