Day 02: It's all about the parking brake

Monday June 15, 2009, 54 km (33 miles) - Total so far: 103 km (64 miles)

• World > Europe > France > Nord-Pas-de-Calais > Dunkerque  - map

• World > Europe > Belgium > West-Vlaanderen > Ieper  - map

It's all about the parking brake

TGP: We both woke up fairly early this morning, which turned out as a good thing, and a bad thing... we left the hotel just before 8am... at which point France is basically shut.... leaving the outskirts of Dunkirk, we passed a Lidl that openend at 8:30, which we waited for , as nothing else was open anywhere... and even when we got to the next town, the only thing open was the boulangerie.... I guess Monday mornings aren't a France kind of thing...!

Drew has been utterly impressed by my ujse of old technology in new ways... I found somwhere on the internet a hint for bicycle touring about using double-sided velcro to wrap around the handlebars and the brakes to hold the brakes on, and how much easier this makes parking the bikes sooooooo much easier... and it really does work well... so well, in fact, that the in phrase today was "It's all about the parking brake..."

I didn't upload Drews video of the menin gate bugler, but here's the links to his videos yesterday where he gets the date wrong...!

after about 1 1/2 hours we got to the first signpost for Ypres... this might seem like a small thing to you guys, but this was a big morale boost to us... we'd had a small diversion en route where they were digging up the road, which took us about 3kms around it... in a car it wouldn't even be noticed, but on a bike it's just annoying to be backtracking where you've come from for a bit, and then add even more kms to the days journey...! 

... a few kilometers on and we reached the belgian border... we got a very stoney-faced look from the border guard (he was a statue after all...) 

... it was a bit of a struggle at times, but we got to Ypres in the end... traversing the famous belgian cobblestone roads that take the nickname (in cycle racing) of "the hell of the north" for a very good reason...!... and after a short sleep, we headed to the Menin Gate for the last post bugle... and it turned out that there was a honour guard and a guy playing the bag pipes too...! 

... We then went and had Mussels and chips.... it was a great shame that Drew couldn't eat his, and that I just HAD to eat all of mine, and 2/3rds of his... it would have been a shame to leave them... (they were fantastic... almost as good as the clams I ended up living off in Vietnam last year...!)

We've got a day around Ypres tomorrow, so it's an easy one just visiting the memorials... and it looks like the weather's going to be hot...

Day 03: Gas attack... Gas attack...!