The finale to my 5,100-km 2018 Grand Tour of Europe: a mad dash along the ‘Riviera’ of Belgium on the North Sea Coast, a stop-over in Bruges, through Gent and past Mechelen and Hasselt to Maastricht. Bruges is a great little city to spend some time in, but horribly expensive.
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Saturday 18 August 2018. Les Hemmes d’Oye · Bruges |118 km|
I left the friendly Les Argousiers campground near Calais at 7.30 am, and before too long passed through the grimy industrial centre that is Dunkirk, and by 9.30 hit the border with Belgium.
Quite a change between the two countries!
The Belgian side is a bustling hive of cut-price retail outlets of all descriptions: the French side only has a self-service petrol outlet with crappy kiosk attached. I’d assumed it might be the other way round, and so wasted my time buying a not-so-cold Orangina on the French side, and then wasted my time all over again indulging in the extravaganza that was the Belgian shopping mall.
The bike path – the signage, the surface quality and the traffic separation – all instantly improved on the Belgian side. It was like suddenly being transported forward 10 years in terms of cycling infrastructure. I’d gotten used to the cycling in France – and to be fair, France is not too bad for cycling either (much better than Australia, for example) – but Belgium, as well as The Netherlands and Germany for that matter, are simply on another level.
The beaches in Belgium aren’t that great though! Very ordinary, all 20 km from Nieuwpoort to Oostende. But from the never-ending corridor of medium-rise holiday apartments that line the esplanade, and the vast hordes of promenaders that emerged at the first hint of blue sky, you’d think you were in the French Riviera or back on the Gold Coast in Australia. I actually feel sorry for them if this is the best they can get for the beach experience.
At Oostende, I easily picked up the Ghent canal and had an easy ride of it into Bruges, arriving early afternoon.
And what a great place it is, Bruges! – interesting, quirky and vibrant, as well as touristic and expensive of course. And you know what? I haven’t got a single photo to show of it – I think I reformatted the SD card by mistake before I uploaded the pictures.
I suspect the Tourist Office in Bruges is in cahoots with some of the hotels, because the lady in the Tourist Office at first told me I’d have zero chance of getting any accommodation at all, but then, hey wait a minute “If you rush straight over to Hotel Jan Brito, they just might be able to help you out, at €270 a night!”
At Jan Brito, the receptionist said they didn’t actually have any rooms left themselves, but their sister hotel, The Flanders, did have one left and I could book it then and there through them. And so, by now thoroughly scared of missing out altogether (FOMO we call it in Australia – Fear Of Missing Out), I straightaway booked that ‘last room’ at The Flanders on the spot. It cost me €257!
And it was definitely the worst room in the hotel too, basically in the basement next to the linen closet, but…what the heck, I was in Bruges, it was mid-afternoon on a Saturday during peak season, and I had a lot of exploring to do. And explore I did.
Shame about the lost photos though. I’d have loved to show you what it looks like. Ah well, I’ll just have to go back won’t I?
Sunday 19 August 2018. Bruges · Maastricht | 222 km|
It wasn’t until about 10.30 that I finally did get away from Bruges after another spot of sightseeing. But I made good time along the canal path all the way to Ghent – once I was able to find the right canal again, that is – and then it was on to another canal towpath as far as Hasselt, and finally a quick run down into Maastricht. I make it sound like a breeze – and don’t get me wrong, it was easy riding – but just a bloody lot of it!
It wasn’t until 9.30 pm that I finally managed to arrive, all tuckered out, into Maastricht after covering a record 222 km for the day (at 22 km/h average speed).
-ends-
5,105 km cycling around Europe in 36 days over the summer of 2018
2018 Europe: Total circuit around France starting and finishing in Maastricht, Netherlands, with two false starts |5,105 km|
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The map is not perfect – the sections by rail from Karlsruhe and Nancy back to Maastricht just show as straight lines even though I tried to cull them out of the final map, and the cycling between Malo and Calais also only shows in this map as a straight line due to some coding error I haven’t resolved yet.