On Friday, we set off with minimal luggage towards Brussels. With over 30 °C, we paused in almost every sparse shade available, constantly asking the few people outside for water and applying sunscreen over and over again.
Belgium showed itself from a completely different side, because not only was it much hillier than our first passage in the north, but also windy. With its street villages, the landscape wasn't particularly attractive either, and the bikelanes turned into the training slopes for tightrope walking that I remebered.
20km before Brussels, we started looking for fries, but really every stand was closed and the only one that wasn't closed had a correspondingly long queue. After we really drove up and down every hill, we found a snack just before our place to stay for the night and placed some dry fries into our stomachs. When we got to Gesa and Mia, we actually just fell straight into bed.
On Saturday morning we were treated to a nice breakfast and then, we continued on the road because after all, we had 140km ahead of us. As with most days where you ride for distance, there isn't much to report here. Since it was hot that day, I was used as a water dispenser with a drinking reminder function in addition to the normal uses as navigation and direction indicator. And then, we got the message that our luggage rack had already arrived in Lille. Almost. As we had already tried to clarify on the phone, the address was wrong (in France, addresses are written like 123 sample address which when using the order form led to sample street 0). At that time, the Dutch post office said that you had to wait for an "address does not exist" before you could try a delivery to the correct address a second time. Inconveniently, however, they switched directly to picking up from a shop. It's not that impractical, you're probably thinking. Well, as it turned out later, it took Colis Prive until Thursday to get the package the one kilometer to the shop, which is about as fast as a snail.
But we were not worried at first and were more concerned with the elevation profile in front of us, until we realized that we will be in the Netherlands from Maastricht! And so, we enjoyed again the reasonable bike paths, which could also be called as such, to be able to drive up the mountain.
In Aachen we picked up the key to Ele's house, went shopping and showered, cooked and ate in her apartment.
On Sunday, Ida and I went our separate ways for the first time in more than a month: Ida drove home to her parents with the €9 ticket to exchange our two large panniers for two smaller ones, just to prevent a second breakage. Anyone who has ever ridden a train can understand how a ride on the DB (German rail company) is related to the title. But even in such situations there are positive moments. Between two late trains, Ida made the acquaintance of a nice retired chemistry teacher, who not only shared the suffering with Ida, but also her insider tip for doner kebabs in Aachen.
Meanwhile, I met friends who still lived in Aachen and picked up a second pair of panniers. As the title suggests, things didn't go quite smoothly here either, but this time it was more on the funny side. Instead of c/o Cruz Santiago, something went wrong when spelling it and so Ida's name ended up slightly different.
After we spent a nice evening at Ele's on Monday, we went back the same way on Tuesday, this time finally with a Belgian border sign.
Now, we were able cycle down all the metres we had to cycle uphill, but the sun and a slight headwind stayed. Since we already knew the route, we avoided unpleasant spots and arrived at Kobe and Katrien by 7. The two of them already rode roughly the same route that we will be taking a few years back, so we bombarded them with questions while we ate the burgers they'd kindly prepared for us.
Unfortunately, we didn't see Katrien the next morning because she took the train to another city early in the morning. Then, after breakfast with Kobe, we realized that the decision to rely on the rain radar in Lille was a bad one, as it was raining outside. But it's only fun when things go wrong and soon, we were cycling through Brussels with new homemade rain jackets, where I discovered a garbage can with the same outfit.
[Transcriptor note: this image is captioned "We Are Trash". I found it funny and I didn't want to hold it back from you :)]
We did not want to push it, so we sheltered for an hour during a particularly heavy shower and enjoyed the rain out of the dry.
Sometimes wetter and sometimes drier, this time there were a few detours so we could cycle bike paths for longer, which we had found beautiful on the way there. And then, we surprised ourselves when we were in France. Of course, we didn't see a sign at the third border crossing either, but the cycle path signage changed.
The second entrance to Lille was a much nicer one and is recommended to anyone who might drives to here themselves (just follow the Canal de Roubaix!).
That was it for the day. Hopefully, we will continue with our normal route from tomorrow!
Before we end with a meme we used to keep our spirits up, a big thanks again to Gerrit from Ligfietsshop, who sent our package off the very next day despite being on vacation!
And now for your astronomy lesson I hand over to Ida:
Since we still have warm summer nights ahead of us, I will introduce you to the constellation “Swan” this week.
Anyone who has paid close attention to the last few entries already knows that this constellation can be found in the clearly visible Summer Triangle. The swan forms a distinctive cross in the starry sky and is also easily recognizable as a swan. The mythology behind the constellation is not entirely clear. One of the most well-known stories is how Zeus, in the form of a swan, seduced the Spartan queen Leda and fathered a pair of twins with her: Castor and Pollux, who were also the namesake of the stars in the constellation Gemini. In addition, the constellation is also very well known for extraterrestrial research.
The Kepler space telescope directed its field of view to a region in the Swan and searched for exoplanets, i.e. planets around other stars. A total of 530,506 stars and 2,662 planets were explored with Kepler. One of them is Kepler 16b, which orbits not just one, but two suns!
[Credit: NASAIJPL-Caltech]
See you later, Alligators!
Tilman & Ida