Day 300-328: Gouda – France - Bike Bimble

July 29, 2025 to August 26, 2025

Day 300-328: Gouda – France

We travelled south from Gouda, keeping to the west of the Netherlanders. It’s pretty. Plenty of windmills, some used to drive mills, others water pumps. Some still spin in the wind, but it doesn’t look like they do anything (electric pumps and industrial mills have long made them redundant). The landscape is highly developed – a counterpoint to some of the areas we saw not that long ago in Africa. We didn’t meet so many people; most have their heads down going about their lives. We did meet some at the end of the day via the WTMG website and WarmShowers.

Going along the coast was not a bad idea. The interior looks very similar one kilometre to the next. While it’s pleasant, it is repetitive. You might say it gets boring after a few days. The coast had a few interesting dykes, inlets, some bridges and a ferry to break it up a little. We did find a hill that had the altitude displayed in centimetres – one way to accentuate the hills.

We crossed into Belgium without so much as a sign indicated we’d done so. The canals are slightly different. Maybe less well manicured, but with nicer (taller) trees. And pretty quickly the memorials of the World Wars started to appear. We didn’t notice for several days, but the landscape still shows a lot of evidence of the wars. There are plenty of obvious marks: memorials, graveyards, signs and a few trenches that have been preserved. And more subtle indications: the buildings look like they’ve been made of similar brick at about the same time. Gone are most of the lovely stone buildings and in their place are square buildings made of small red bricks.

posh bikes are in use in Belgium, they even have mud guards

We couldn’t help but be tourists and visit Brugge and Gent. Sample some Belgium chocolate and a little beer. Both have a good reputation for a reason.

Bruges....happy as there are Belgium chocolates nearby

The pharmacy of the oldest hospitals in Europe. Saint Johns

They were ahead of their day, using mobile phones on their lunch break

Hans Memling paintings on display in the hospital (i waited for a long time to try and get a posterior scalp shot, but gave up in the end...nice locks)

We kept changing our mind about which way to go in Belgium. There are good options everywhere – nice old towns, war memorials, some forests and some (small) hills – welcome after the horizontal overload of Netherlands. It’s also home to Welcome To My Garden and there are lots of people willing to host us for a night. Standouts are the woman who set up an outside shower and coffee bar on her vacant field, several hours talking politics with some hosts, and the happiest family in Belgium, who’s young daughter couldn’t speak any English but was literally bouncing with excitement for about half an hour at just having us stay in her back yard. We were rock stars for a brief period.

We were late to meet our WTMG host as we 'found' a war grave on the way there. She assured us we would find many in the following days, she was not wrong!

Menenpoort: there is a last post here at 8pm every evening. There was a Scottish bagpipe group as well. Always pretty emotional

The happiest family in the world. Renee at the bottom was so excited to have us stay. It was lovely. Sebastien and Sofie had ridden a tandem through Europe twice before they had kids. The day after we left they were headed off on a family trip, parents on the tandem and the kids on their own bikes

The direction ended up being decided by the weather. Belgium’s latitude is roughly the same as the south of England and has weather to match. Even in late July we had some ugly (rain and wind) weather. This squeezed us closer to the French border which was a good thing. We crossed into French Belgium, and then France proper, had a taste of real croissant, etc then came back to see more war graves and the Arden. We had good luck and were able to slip in a couple of victory laps at Roubaix velodrome.

A lap around Roubaix....well a few laps. The iconic shower block was closed: apparently every winner of the Paris-Roubaix gets a brass plaque in a shower cubicle including Eddie Merckx, Fausto Coppi and Peter Sagan

Rather than go round in circles in Belgium (which could have been fun when it wasn’t raining) we headed south the spend the last 30 days or so of our time in the Schengen zone in France. We went through the Arden which is a very pretty area with rolling hills. And from what we could gather, many retired Dutch are moving here.

Karin, a Dutch immigrant in France. We went to leave and spent an extra 1.5 hours talking at the front gate!

France is huge. If we had put our heads down and put in some serious distance, we could have gone further. But it turns out that’s not the point. I had dreams of heading almost to the Mediterranean and then slowly wandering to the Atlantic coast before taking a ferry to England. That looks like a nice loop on the map, and it took me a while to notice the distance is about 2500km (before adding the twists and turns of cycle touring). We did a little over half that but ended up with a pretty good (although hardly planned) route through the middle of France.

We started off going through Reims and the Champagne district, before being given the keys to a flat in Paris for a couple of nights (we hadn’t planned to go into Paris). We stayed a night in a garden south of Reims, the host must have taken a liking to us (or took sympathy on us?). After sharing some of the wine he made (turns out his family owns a small farm and winery), he started trying to work out how we could stay in Paris. We’d given up visiting Paris, because we’d both been there before and none of the accommodation we looked at on-line suggests you can store a bicycle. Small apartments generally don’t like it when you want to bring the bikes into the room (and fair enough, if you’re not extremely careful you can make a big mess / damage the place). But this guy had the spare keys to a tiny (22m2) apartment in Paris (which someone else owned) and he gave them to us as we left the next day. It got a bit complicated – the spare set of keys were taken back the next day after we’d set up camp, and we swapped these for instructions to contact his cousin in Paris to get a different set of spare keys, but we ended up spending 2 nights in a shoe-box in Paris. All the big stuff (Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Mont Marte, etc, etc) is more or less how we left it last time and just as impressive. But they’ve transformed the city by completely stuffing with the traffic – most roads are half the width and one way, and the remaining space is given over to pedestrian and bicycle lanes. It’s completely amazing. The locals may well hate it to bits (or probably did until getting used to it), but the city is so much nicer without being clogged by traffic. I understand we can thank the Olympics for some of this.

Laurent: just a pleasure to meet. We can not be more thankful for his generosity. But Im disappointed I didnt push for a taste of his bubbly

Stevo went out for a solo tour and found some sites

From Paris we crossed the relatively barren plains to Orlean in the Loire valley and followed the Loire River to the coast. It’s a tourist area and a popular cycle route, for a reason. It’s very easy to cycle, and quite pretty. The valley is mostly very wide and looks more like a huge flood plain than a valley, but perhaps “Plaine inondable de la Loire” doesn’t roll off the tongue as nicely as “Val de Loire”. Chateaus everywhere, plenty of side trips for more pretty buildings/towns and chateaus. This route took us through cities Tours and Angers to Nantes on the coast.

The yummiest thing I have ever eaten: kouign amann. Even better was I had no idea what it was before I saw it at the bakery

There are several options for getting to the UK from France. And several ferry routes. We decided to take one that would give us fewer miles in England so headed to the north coast of Brittany. This part involved riding over some hills (Shock! Horror!) that we hadn’t seen since Norway and Germany. They were quite small hills.

Still brilliant baguette and croissant at every town.

Just one occasion of eating the good stuff (We put on weight in France)

We took a touristy detour to stand in front of Mont-Saint-Michel, gaze then decide not to try to fight through the thousands of tourists to see the insides of another church. Even one built on a rock. Saint Malo wasn’t much better for us. At least most tourists end up in a few (tremendously beautiful) places, ruin them for each other and leave most the country alone. More reasons to travel independently and slowly.

What a campsite: beautiful evening, a foggy mess in the morning when we woke: Brittany

We rode some more on the north coast of Britanny toward Roscoat and the ferry. Very pleasant to ride through France, and we had our fill of boulangerie in a month. We would have stayed longer if the Schengen visa allowed. But it didn’t, so on day 88 of our 90 days, we took a ferry to Blighty.

What a sad day. It was finally thrown out: coke bottle from South Africa: they definitely do not need to be single use: shame that mostly all of them are

Today's ride: 2 km (1 miles)
Total: 15,439 km (9,588 miles)

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