E3 Harkelbeke

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Happy Friday! Day 2 of our vacation. First of all, I would like to tell everyone that we were REALLY tired last night, and did not spell check or reread our post before posting .... looking at it this morning, you really had to hang in there to figure it out.. The good news is that we are not so tired tonight, so this should be a better effort.

Before I start about today, I wanted to tell you about the hotel we are staying at. It is about a half block off the main square in Roubaix and is an older hotel. The rooms are small but comfortable, and best of all we have figured out how to work everything. Today was a race day. The E3 Harkelbeke begins and ends in (you guessed it) Harkelbeke, and it is a 210 KM race. This is the first race in the week of races leading up to the Tour of Flanders.

The race started at 12 pm and finished right at 5 pm - which means the riders averaged about 41km/hour. Today was a little cool - the displays were showing 7 degrees Celsius which is about 46 degrees Fahrenheit - but the wind was blowing a gale at about 18 miles per hour .... so it felt a little cool. Even with that, there were probably about 8000 people in the square where the race started and finished, and then there were pockets of crowds on the race route as well. The race coverage had 2 helicopters, and probably 5 motorbikes with cameramen on the back. You can sure tell this is the national pastime. At the start point, there were places you could buy team jerseys and clothes (I got a nice warm stocking hat with a brim) and there were food vendors. Most of the food was stuff you would see in the states ... hotdogs, hamburgers, ice cream .... But there was one stand that sold fish skins that had been ... it looked like .. salted and dried. We never saw anyone buy one of these, so I am not quite sure how you would eat one ... much less why ... but that was different.

Harkelbeke is about maybe 30 KMs from where we are staying but it seemed like we drove a lot further than that. Dave and I have noticed that our Garmin ... first of all, takes random routes ... and secondly, if she gets tired of recalculating because we miss a turn, she just keeps routing us back to the same place again and again. Maybe she has always done this, but today, we looped three times - like a giant round about - until we managed to get all of the turns and veers right. But we got to the town, found a place to park (harder than you think), and then found the race.

We had intended to watch the start of the race, and then drive to another town on the route and watch the race come through. What we found out was that this was very hard to do. The race route went through little towns, and the few roads that connect those towns were closed for the race. So using Garmin and Google Earth, we tried to find an alternate route from Harkelbeke to Oudenaarde. The race estimated that the riders would take about an hour to make the trip, we got there in about an hour and a half. In that hour and a half, we were on tiny little roads with steep ditches on each side .. And we were meeting traffic too. No idea how those roads got to be roads ... Dave suggested that maybe the roads reflected (ancient) property boundaries. And though that doesn't seem to make much sense, it is at least an explanation.

We also encountered some comical traffic situations. First of all, there was one poorly engineered intersection that caused like a clump of cars to form ... some of the cars wanted to go straight, some wanted to turn right, others wanted to turn left ... It took three light cycles for this to sort out. I did take a picture of the clump for you. Later on in our trip, in one of the seemingly endless roundabouts, we came upon one roundabout that had failed. There was a policeman there directing traffic through the roundabout. Now that made me smile, and I took a picture of it too.

We finally got near Harkelbeke, only to discover that we were trapped in a three block area, bounded on all sides by the race. We finally followed a local car who also was trapped who the police let out. Once we finally got back to Harkelbeke, we decided to watch the race on TV in one of the cafes. It was packed with race goers. They were so busy, they were washing glasses and immediately refilling them. But they had good soup, and the beer was good ... And we had seats, so we stayed there for a couple of hours.

Fabian Cancellera won the race - by over a minute. He attacked about 27 KMs from the finish and ran away with the race. We watched the finish about 25m from the finish by a family from Harkelbeke. Their English was better than my French, and we chatted about racing a little. Their son is going to race in the 11 year and under Tour of Flanders race next weekend ... so we have someone to cheer for now.

Tomorrow is a tour day. We will for sure seethe Paris-Roubaix cobblestones, and then will try and get some bike riding in ... Either in Roubaix, or Lille, or maybe Tournai. But we don't have to decide until tomorrow at breakfast.

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Photos

The view from our room
That's a school with a aground on the roof. Amazing!

Our room in Roubaix
Wonderful!

Comments

[Daryl Ring]

fun
sounds fun and is keeping you busy

[mom]

what the h?
if not for mary jeanne we wouldn't know how to get to the blog - luckily she and Bob are enjoying it and so keep me updated. but what the h?

[The Ring Travel Saga]

Try this
http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/France/blog-777550.html. Here is the link for today.