The start of a new cycling season in Europe: I collect my bike from my friend’s house near Wesel in the German Ruhr and head south to Aachen where I pick up the Vennbahnweg rail trail and then carry on through the Belgian and French Ardennes to the champagne capital of Reims.
Day 1: Thursday 11 May 2023. Voerde to Landsgraaf |125 km|
[11⁰C, overcast and “damp”; 10:00 am departure. ODO reading 28,778 km at start]
I must admit it was with some reluctance – and apprehension – that I left that big lovely warm and friendly home of Dieter and Dorothea [the German expression gemütlich expresses it far better than any English] for the start of yet another 3-4 month stint on the bike.
But I pretty soon got back in the groove, and all the racing crowding conflicting thoughts of the past few idle months just fell away as I found myself dwelling in the immediate NOW – rare for me! And the kilometers piled up. It’s a good state to be in.
The weather wasn’t particularly kind – and, with a slight head wind as well I only averaged 17 km/h with me doing 42% of the work (and the Bosch batteries supplying the rest). But all-in-all not a bad effort, considering this was my first day back on a loaded bike in touring mode 6 months after snapping the head off my left femur. So all better now, thanks for asking.
I over-reached though, and didn’t give enough consideration to where I’d be ending up for the night and so had to settle for the rather non-descript Camping de Watertoren near Aachen city but just over the border into the Netherlands. €20 for the pitch, with plenty of electricity for the bike but nothing to feed me – just 3 small beers from the reception office fridge. My helpful Dutch camp-neighbour, Harald, sorted out a problem with the power connection that involved his 30m extension cable snaking across from ‘his’ outlet. Mine didn’t work.
Day 2: Friday 12 May 2023. Landsgraaf to Stavelot |122 km|
It rained all night and I had to pack away a wet tent in the morning. It was still raining – albeit just a weak drizzle – up until 12:00 midday but I felt snug and smug in my head-to-toe wet-weather gear, no problemo. 11 – 13⁰C was all the sun could muster. Sounds rather chilly looking back on it, but at the time it made for very comfortable riding conditions.
I was soon onto the rail trail – that’s the Vennbahnradweg that goes 125 km south from Aachen to Luxembourg and is part of Belgium’s RAVel bicycle path network based on disused railway lines. I was supposed to be getting off at the town of St Vith to then head on west to Bastogne. Except I couldn’t find St Vith! An impossible feat, one would imagine, especially since the rail trail passes right through it. Disappointing too, as I fondly remember St Vith as having one of the nicest little campsites I’ve ever stayed at (see post #45).
Anyway, I stopped at 1:15 pm at Roetgen to power-up at a free public eBike charging station and to plot my immediate navigation and I think that’s where I went wrong – as soon as I headed off again I went the wrong way due to me thinking the town of Malmedy is located somewhere where it isn’t. Basically, that means I followed a side-route sign instead of the main RAVel through-route signage, which is easy enough to do, and my Bosch GPS was of no use at all as it cannot be set to a particular route, only to a destination (although it is possible to upload entire routes onto it).
I became desperate as the batteries wound down – did I mention I can hardly go anywhere at all on that fully-loaded eBike without power assistance ? – so I used the Bosch GPS app to zero me in on a campground in the vicinity. Thus, in a round-about way, and after trying two closed/non-existent sites, I ended up at the Spa Francochamps Formula 1 Motor Racing Circuit near Stavelot on the last dregs of battery power, and hauled-in to their campsite called Camping Eau Rouge. €22 got me an adequate pitch, another €10 got me a really great spag. bol. (carbohydrates are just what the body craves after a big day in the saddle!) and several lots of €2 got me several lots of Belgian bottled beer. And no, I’m not gonna say how many ‘several’ is. Sleep-time was strictly from 10.30 to 6.00 am only, because practice time around the race circuit is all the rest of the day and the thrashing engines sure do resonate down into the camp. There was a vintage car race meet on over the weekend, and the campsite filled up with car enthusiast tent campers in their heritage sporty cars (mainly British, I noticed).
But…my bike’s kickstand sank into the rain-soaked soil when I arrived, and the twisting weight of the bike snapped it clean off – ouch, reminded me of something else I snapped off recently. It’s very difficult to load or unload the bike if you can’t stand it up or lean it against something, so I needed to get it attended to.
Day 3: Saturday 13 May 2023. Stavlot to Bastogne |70 km|
Stavelot has a bike shop that opened at 10:00 am, and so I hung around until almost 11:00 am trying to get the bike’s kickstand repaired/replaced. It was a cold, wet, dull and windy day so I wasn’t particularly complaining about the delay. The bike shop guy was friendly enough and trying to be helpful; however, he didn’t even have a small bolt to replace the one that had actually broken, and so was of no use. The stand itself was still ok, sort-of, but the miss-shapen hole where we’d drilled out the base plate in Toulouse when the last bolt broke is now the source of the ongoing problem.
Hmmph…my ‘helpful’ bike mechanic forgot to reset the quick-release lever for the rear wheel, and consequently the bloody wheel fell off didn’t it! – fortunately, this occured just as I was getting-going again from a quick pit-stop in Trois Ponts some 6 km down the track from Stavelot that included a hair-raising fast downhill run. That could have been disastrous if it’d happended on the open road! Memo to self – check the drop-outs after the wheels have been dropped out and put back on.
I left the Vennbahn cycleway at Trois Ponts (a lovely little tourist town, by the way, with a great boulangerie) and moved off onto arduous hilly B roads through the Haut Ardenne for 15 km as far as Vielsalm, where I encountered another rail trail, RAVel 163, (you can marvel at the website’s poor auto-translation that delivers rather flowery English – for example: “..where folklore and tasty terroir with salted meats are nestled in the heart of the valleys of the region..” What the…!!).
RAVel 163 went all the way to Bastogne, though it was unsurfaced rough dirt and hard going for most of it.
Even though my stop-over campsite in Bastogne, called Camping de Renval, was fully manned – and had a busy bar/restaurant in action as part of the acceuil (reception) – the lazy buggers insisted on me using their completely disfunctional auto-check-in machine to obtain a tent pitch. And boy, was it crowded. Not. Look at the next photo. I was the only tent-dweller there, and it wuld have been much simpler to take my cash and wave me over to the general area of the tent pitches, instead of me having to battle that infernal machine for 10 minutes and having to make two trips back to the bar to get assistance.
There was heavy rain at 4:00 pm just after I set up tent, but then glorious sunshine again afterwards that persisted until 7:30. Strange weather around here! That made 3 bouts of heavy rain for the day, and I had to deal with some horrible manky-smelling gear for the next week or so as it never got the chance to properly dry out.
In protest at their sheer bloody-minded laziness, I used the supermarket across the street to get some provisions and avoided their own food and drink outlet. Guess I taught them huh!
Day 4: Sunday 14 May 2023. Bastogne to Bouillon |80 km|
[Sunny and around 21⁰C; a cold night. No rain].
After checking out down-town Bastogne and grabbing a few more provisions from the excellent boulangerie in the main square, I got straight back on to RAVel 163 as far as Libremont and then hived off on to RAVel 169 to Bertrix. Unfortunately RAVel 169 mainly exists on paper only (it’s designated a “pre-RAVel” that they intend to get around to actually building one day) and so there were a lot of hills and poor forest single-track and overgrown hiking trails to negotiate this day.
Bouillon is a very up-market day-tripping tourist destination on the banks of the Semois River close to the Belgium-France border and has a fascinating history. But for the minor quirks of history it would still be an autonomous enclave with status akin to that of Monaco – it used to be, right up until 1795. It also belonged to the leader of the First Crusade, Godfrey, who ditched Bouillon when he became King of Jerusalem in the year 1099.
But for me, Bouillon was less than salubrious. I had in mind a terrific little riverside campsite with a 3-hat Michelin restaurant and swimming pool on site – what I got instead was Camping Moulin de la Falize which was diabolical. Nowhere near the river, perched high up on a ridge and difficult to get to but with the views all built-out by surrounding small-acre plots, restaurant closed (the liars!), internet didn’t work (liar-liar!). Lucky then that I still had ⅓ of a baguette and a pitiful stub of saucisson left to eat for supper.
Day 5: Monday 15 May 2023. Bouillon to Reims |118 km|
I could hardly wait to get out of that hell-hole of a geriatric final resting place. It was hilly and tough going to Sedan where I tried for the ‘Ardennes Trail’ but it was closed off and so had to take D roads to keep heading west.
I ran out of battery at the village of Annelles but I spotted a power plug just inside the sliding door of a barn and the farmer let me use it to recharge – and for a long time too, nearly 2 hours, I was sat there in that cold windswept village street staring at that creaking barn door.
But not staring long enough. The batteries ran down again and I only made it to the outskirts of Reims on empty, with no campground apparently nearby, and so I ‘had to’ stay at the 3-star PRIM Hotel (€65) in the suburb of Witry, which was actually rather nice I have to say, much better than the previous night’s effort anyway.
I didn’t stop in Reims (fun fact: it’s pronounced Rence with emphasis on the trilled ‘R’, and I hadn’t a clue what they were talking about at first). There wasn’t much evidence in the way of it being a champagne production district except for several large ware-house style champagne retail stores, but at least I cycled right the way through the heart of the city and so got to have a bit of a look at it. Maybe next time I’ll stay longer huh.
-ends-
Europe 2023 so far:
515 km cycled in 4 days.
3 nights in tent; 1 night in hotel
kickstand broke; repaired without cost.
This post was composed over 26 – 28 June, 2033, using Dundee Packpackers’ crappy WiFi and first made public on 30 June.