Spring cycling classics in Belgium - our first day

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Hello everybody! Today was our first day in Belgium. We arrived after an overnight flight this morning at about 7 am And decided that since we were already in Brussels, we should travel to Bastogne to visit the Battle of the Bulge museum. So we fired up our Garmin, set it to kilometers, braced oushelves for the roundabout roulette game and off we went. It turned out to be about an hour and a half from Brussels and was a nice drive. Bastogne is a town of narrow winding streets, roundabouts, one way streets, cobblestones and hills. Garmin had to favorite phrases ... Entree roundabout and recalculating. We found the museum, circled it a couple of times and parked. It turned othere reserve were two museums in that building -- one was the WW II museum and the other was a museum that had a display of one guys lifetime of photographs. We went to both Aand found things in the both that we liked. The WWII museum was very interesting and provided views of the battle from the perspectives of the German and Allied Soldiers and then from the perspective of the townspeople. Most of the museum information waavail label in three languages ... Dutch, French, and English. We had been warned that in this part of Belgium, there were not many English speakers - and we confirmed that today. Everyone was very friendly, but we definitely had a language barrier. We decided to eat lunch at one of the laces in our tour book ... That turned out to be adventure. first of all, there were no English menus available - so we decided to go with the lunch of the day for 14 € but we were not exactly sure what it was going to be. It turned out to be tomato soup followed by a lasagna, and was fine, but expensive. The best part of the lunch was tone cool place it was in .. And watching all of the people at lunch.

After lunch, it was time to drive cover to Roubaix France where we will stay for the next three days. Roubaix is where one of the spring classic races ends and is famous for its cobblestones ... That we will see and ride on while we are here. It was about a 2 or 3 hour drive from Bastogne, and then once we got to Roubaix, we were in a Garmin roundabout do loop for about 45 minutes. Finally we broke out of the loop and the hotel hotel ... Very nice, down townfriendly staff staff. Quick trip to a local grocery store for water, beer, wine, cokes and snacks and we were are in for the night.

Tomorrow we are going to go to our first bike race and do some sightseeing.

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Comments

[Mary Jeanne Gunnare]

Fun reading. Thanks, Dave!