Every day when I’m travelling I see something cool. Sometimes it’s just the colour of the sky or the crispness of the snow, other days it’s a momument, a building or archeological remains.
Up at 6:30, packed and ready to go at 7. I'll skip breakfast as usual, I refill my water bottles and can have something from my snack bag when I get hungry. I ask the receptionist what was up with all the late arrivals and she explains there was a beer festival nearby, that explains..… Continue reading To Milan – part 2
Tomorrow my mom arrives in Milan by bike, after a month long trek from Belgium. As usual the last few years, we're making a city trip out of it! Since Milan is only about a 1000 km from Antwerp by car if you take the straightest route, I'll be taking the car there and we'll… Continue reading To Milan – part 1
Up at seven! We’re ambitious today and want to both walk and visit a castle, so we try to be a bit more efficient with our morning routine. For the walk, last week I investigated the sights, the paths and parking options and came up with a tour of about 12 km. The parking is… Continue reading Bunkers
Up at seven thirty today, though I woke up a few times before that (again). We’re close by a road with quite some traffic, plus we slept with the windows open to cool the room down, hence the hiccups. We take our entire electronics stock down for breakfast: phone & tablet for organising the day,… Continue reading Flexible loop
Since we were in so late yesterday, we decided to forgo an alarm. I wake up a few times during the night, but suddenly it’s eight thirty. We have a leisurely breakfast - I combine American pancakes with vanilla sauce and mixed nuts and love it - and discuss the options for today. It’s only… Continue reading Sequoias etc
Normally these blog reports start with getting up from bed, but today I must admit I’ve been lazy and didn’t write yesterday about yesterday’s adventures, so this post kicks off with a summary. I can even be very brief, because it must have been one of the most frustrating holiday launches ever. We finished our… Continue reading Traffic jams
Today is the final day of our weekend away, so the get up / breakfast routine is followed by the pack up and check out procedure. We decided yesterday to visit Luxembourg city today, it’s not far from where we’re staying and should have many interesting things to see. To clarify, ‘Luxembourg’ is a country… Continue reading Luxembourg – the city
The breakfast buffet opens at eight, so we set the alarm at half past seven and as usual on a holiday, wake up before it starts ringing. We meet our friends downstairs and load up on calories for a big hike. The bread rolls are excellent, but the pain au chocolat and croissant only mediocre.… Continue reading Our procession to Echternach (and back)
Up at 6:10, the usual time for a Friday. We have a day off and have a long weekend planned, so we pack, give the cats extra food and impatiently wait for our pick-up. They’re a bit late and I’m very eager, vibrating with the eagerness to get going. Our friends arrive around nine and… Continue reading To Echternach
I wake up at a quarter to eight, that’s perfect. We crawled in a bit later yesterday, as I infected mom with the Words of Wonders virus and we spent the whole evening playing on my phone. Getting quite far in the butterfly tournament! Breakfast is leftover bread with olive oil, grapes and cherry tomatoes.… Continue reading Fine arts
Up at seven again, it’s just impossible to get used to Spanish time unless you really make an effort, but then afterward you’ll have to make a similar effort to get back on Belgium time. Both are in the same time zone, but the Spanish do have a different rythm. Fruit salad and goat yoghurt… Continue reading Shop & Eat
I wake up around seven, I can tell mom is awake as well by the light of her phone coming through the frosted glass door, so we confer briefly and decide to get up. We have some crackers and dark Belgian chocolate for breakfast and spend the early morning looking up plant info for the… Continue reading Guggenheim
Up at eight. Eight! It’s just that there’s nothing to do early in the morning, plus restaurants start serving lunch only at two or so, so we’re shifting our whole day out of whack. First job is to get the DHL shipment ready, so after a quick run to the bakery and a breakfast of… Continue reading A day by the sea
After a quiet flight of about 90 minutes the plane lands in Bilbao, Spain. It looks a bit rainy, or foggy, hard to say. Since I’m in a seat way at the front, I can exit the plane pretty efficiently and, admiring the design of the building, make my way to the luggage carrousels and… Continue reading Logistics
I’m taking off today on a city trip to Bilboa (Spain), internationally known as Bilbao. Not to be confused with Balboa, as in Rocky Balboa. I’ll meet my mom, who left for Bilboa from Belgium about 4 weeks and 2000 km ago. 2000 km! I took a local train this morning at 7:13, switched to… Continue reading To Bilbao! Bilboa!
No alarm again, we're trained so well that we wake up at seven anyway. We look up the different animal parks in the area and decide to visit Planète Sauvage or 'untamed planet' zoo. It has a relatively small area for pedestrians, but 10 km of safari park to be visited with your own car.… Continue reading Planète Sauvage
No alarm today! Yesterday we managed to make a lunch reservation at a nearby gastronomical restaurant somehow. The website said a spot was open on Friday, we took it and then got a very polite call from the restaurant: website was wrong, there is no spot, much apologies, do we want to go on the… Continue reading Sealife, good food and a dolmen
The shuttle over the Saint-Nazaire bridge runs every hour and since we're up pretty early, we'll try to catch the first one at nine thirty. We do an efficient run on the breakfast buffet, pack all our stuff back in the bike bags and are ready to leave before nine. I must admit my packing… Continue reading Back to the car
From Nantes we can make it in one go to the Atlantic coast near Saint-Nazaire. We get up extra early (seven!) in an attempt to avoid the tourist groups this hotel seems to specialize in, but fail utterly and have a basic breakfast in a very busy room: very quickly. We drag our bags to… Continue reading To the coast
I've had to juggle with the segments because the route after Nantes city is a bit bare of accommodation and restaurants on Monday evenings, so today we're only doing 22 km. Having some trouble with the Wi-Fi, my post draft was lost and I don't have time to write it again before going out to… Continue reading Nantes
Breakfast, again, only from eight thirty. That's a bit later than we'd like, but then I realize it's the weekend! Weekdays don't matter much when you travel by bike, except that you have to remember that shops and restaurants might be closed on specific days. In France, that's Sunday afternoon/evening and Monday. Today is Sunday.… Continue reading Fields and valleys
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