After a fantastic 2 weeks in England saying goodbye to friends and family we finally made it across the channel to Dunkerque and began our journey into the unknown. The last week we have been cycling across Belgium a country that is constantly changing, from different people, languages, architecture and scenery, Belgium has really exceeded our expectations.

We are now sitting around 20km from the German border in German speaking Belgium high in the hills overlooking a magnificent lake from the comfort of our campsites cafeteria. Today we are taking a day off to reflect on a tough but rewarding week, a week full of new experiences. We had our first visitors on the road in Suus’s mum Sonja and Martin who met us in the historic city of Ieper in the west of Belgium. We had our first night camping, our first trip to the launderette, our first experience of cooking by the side of the road because we could not find a restaurant or shop open , our first day of cycling more than 100km and our first experience of cycling up extremely steep roads high in to the hills.

We are making steady progress but after our record breaking 100km dash we hit the wall of the Ardenne, where we could suddenly only manage a feeble 40Km a day and on the map it looked like we had hardly moved. Nevertheless this is great training for later when we come into real mountainous regions and the views are absolutely spectacular.

In England we quickly realised that local tourist centres usually have information for all the cycling tours in that region, so yesterday we picked up some great resources from the TIC in Malmedy with cycling routes through running south east through the first part of Germany, luckily it shows the gradients so we can choose the less steep route through, for now!