Day 17; leaving France
Day 17; back to Belgium. 110 km.
Weather today; super. In the morning already warm and almost no wind. We were out of bed early but the hotel was very lazy and no breakfast or any activity that looked like it was going to happen any time soon. Ben went for a bakery and a supermarket to get lunch and win back some of the lost time. Lucas and Erin sent us off before heading to the train themselves.
Climbing out of Boulogne-sur-Mer is quite a thing, what made it worse is that they put a traffic light at a 13 % climb. A tandem can never start up at 13 % so halfway we had to walk. Once we were out of the greater city it was one of the best rides so far. We did have some steep climbs but most of the ride was flat through a lovely valley. There were many cyclists with panniers on these nice roads, later we found out that we were riding part of ththe Noordzee route.
The names of the villages became Dutch with a French spelling, this used to be part of Flanders but it got nicked by the French Kings. We recognised the accent from the a people in the coffee stop cafe from the brilliant film “Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis”.
It was still 20 km to go to the Belgium border but everything looked already very Flemish, so in the end we did not notice the border at all.
Ieper, our endpoint for today, is a special place. It was ruined in WW1 and has been completely rebuild. We went to the last post at the Menenpoort and it was very impressive. So may names on the wall, and this is only a part of all the men that lost their lives here ( Passendale has its own monument. And Verdun, the Somme, the Marne etc have their own monuments).
We had dinner at a Frietkot with shrimp croquets, very nice (and a lot cheaper compared to the restaurants on the central square).
Our hotel is right in the centre of the town, with a lot of bikes in the shed our tandem is complete blocked. Still we are trying for an early start tomorrow, it will be a long day to Antwerpen.
