October 2, 2016
Diegem near Brussels Airport: The wheels stop turning
It is a strange feeling to think that we won't be packing up tomorrow morning and getting on the bikes to navigate our way through more unfamiliar land. Ken's bike computer says we have done 3003km but the blog says 2989km - the descrepancy being that at one stage Ken went on an exploratory ride and felt that shouldn't be added to our overall trip distance.
After the very wiggly part of yesterday's ride we decided that we would look for something straighter. The route we came up with was largely on dedicated cycle routes but at least twice the distance of the direct route. That however didn't bother us too much as even then the overall distance wasn't that far. We were to start riding north of Aalst (certainly not the direction we needed to go) on what looked as if I'd was a rail trail, this would lead us to the Willebroekse Canal and then we would turn South and follow this nearly all the way to the airport
The weather forcast was ghastly with showers and thunderstorms predicted throughout the day so we imagined we would get wet. As we left there were some small spits of rain but these soon disappeared, it was cold though, only 11 degrees according to the pharmacy. Finding the rail trail was easy and it was a suprise to us that we even found an open bakery so we were able to get bread for lunch. Progress was fast and easy and we saw packs of identically clad cyclists out for their Sunday morning fix. As we reached the canal I spotted an open bar, it was jammed with beer drinking men but we were able to get what was a fairly nasty coffee.
The Willebroekse Canal is huge and links Brussels to the town of Willebroek a distance of around 28km - linking it to the Scheldt River that we were riding on yesterday and of course to Antwerp. This canal was completed in 1530. The canal structure of Belgium is inceredibly impressive and it is used. I have been suprised by how much heavy industry there is in Belgium and a lot of it is on the banks of these canals which to me seem like arteries throughout the country.
When we were getting to the airport area navigation became a bit trickier. We were passing through an part that seemed to be largely Muslin - on our tram tour of Ghent we saw a similar ares. However we found our way to Diegem with little problem but when we got there things were more tricky as we didn't have a clue where the Ibis hotel was and there was no one to ask because everything was shut. However naturally eventually we got here. We have dismantled and packed up our bikes and will have tomorrow to go in by train t have a bit of a poke around Brussels
We didn't get rained on all day - it threatened all day.
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Today's ride: 55 km (34 miles)
Total: 2,989 km (1,856 miles)
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