August 5, 2021
Our Tour of Flanders
Pass the Valium, s’il vous plait
The day gets off to an anxious start when we open our email and find this disturbing communication:
Rocky and I spend an anxious several minutes worrying about this - wondering why it happened, whether we have recourse, and what to do next. I look up the account for our credit card and am hopeful when I don’t see a cancellation credit posted yet, but that’s only a negative indicator. We’re just looking up the number to call Thalys when a second email arrives, just minutes after the first:
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There is also the vexing question in there of whether we can board the train without having a valid European Covid Digital Certificate. We haven’t been able to find any reference that says Americans can be certified into this system yet, so Rachael called Thalys to ask if we’d be allowed to board with only our American credentials. It sounds like that shouldn’t be an issue, but we’ll know for sure when the doors of the train close behind us next week.
The Tour of Flanders
For having travelled so many times in Europe, Rachael and I are pretty ignorant of the Low Countries. For decades now we’ve told our friends and family that we were saving them for when we became too old to tackle the mountains any more.
Hey, guess what?
We’d heard of Flanders of course, but have never considered or studied it as a place to bicycle. I think it’s fair to say that we weren’t even clear on which part of Belgium was Flanders, and which was Wallonia. In case you aren’t too sure yourself, here’s a visual aid:
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Now that we look, we see that there’s much to like here. We’re really excited about our little Tour of Flanders, and feel lucky that our concerns about avoiding a possible quarantine pushed us into a direction we’d never considered taking.
The Tour of Flanders is one of the oldest races on the professional cycling circuit. It has the longest non-stop record, having been run annually since 1919 after being interrupted by World War I (although it was run as a modified and delayed version last year due to Covid). Even the German occupation during World War II didn’t stop it.
A one day race normally staged in April, it has begun at various times in Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent, and Sint-Niklaas. In what sounds like a truly brutal event, it features gruelingly steep climbs on cobblestones - for example, up the infamous Murr van Geraardsbergen:
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Tempting for sure, but Team Anderson has a different idea. Our Tour of Flanders looks like this:
- Take the train to Antwerp and stay there four nights, using it as a base for day rides. We’ll have to see if Grammant is close enough to Ghent to dash over there for that climb, but it looks like it might be just a bit too far.
- Bicycle from Antwerp to Ghent and stay there for another three nights and more day rides. We’ll have to see if Grammant is close enough to Antwerp to dash over there for that climb, but I’m afraid that may not be possible.
- Bicycle from there to Bruges for another three night stand.
- Take the train east from Bruges to Luxembourg for a two night stay before biking east into Germany to pick up with our originally planned itinerary in Trier.
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