Thanks, Mark. To inspire and to be inspired by others is the quiet joy of this site, isn't it?

We set off again in a week or two, to zig-zag across Holland on paths and tracks. Or, if we decide to do something else, something else. The point is that life must always have Something!

I so love your writing. Thank you for sharing so many journeys - you're successfully diverting me from a very healthy number of chores - and please, do keep travelling. It's such a joy to read your musings and, as a francophile, to pick up a few new nuggets about our cousins outre-manche. Bonne continuation. 🤗

Thanks, David. Thanks for joining me on the trip.

happy days

léo

Leo,

Thanks for a vicarious journey during this lockdown. It was wonderful.

David

Thanks for another great journal Leo.

Mike

It worked, I can see them now, too. Thanks!

The Great Divide! I’ll look forward to that. We leave for Santiago n3xt week for three months in Spain and Portugal; then back stateside for two months in the southwest before returning home.

Cheers, thanks again.

Thanks, Scott. I think maybe ten days somewhere locally next month and then maybe Cambodia in the winter and the Great Divide in the summer. How about you?

happy days
léo

Thanks so much for taking us along with you once more, Leo. Rest up, ride again. We’ll be waiting.

So glad you liked it. We rode a little more than 1.700km in the end, much of it with an admirable lack of stress

Hi Leo,
Thanks for a lovely journey. I’ve managed to learn a few things from you journal, and that of course is a Good a Thing, especially when I knew in advance that I would be entertained. I learned that ten days should see one safely from Burgundy to Luxembourg, and since that is a journey I want to make one day soon it is a valuable bit of info. I learned that the Moselle Velo route is open, but sometimes difficult to follow. And I learned the real reason you don’t like vineyards, namely that you don’t like wine. Odd for a Frenchman, but we are all entitled to our preferences, aren’t we? Makes me wonder if some of the gluten avoiders dislike wheat fields. Peu importe. I will be waiting for your next voyage, impatiently I suppose, but don’t do it just for me or any other admiring fan, do it for the joys that come when you’ve cheated the onset of senility yet one more time.
Gros bises à Steph.
Cheers,
Keith

I don't know where the fault was but I've redone the page and, here at least, I can see the photos

For some reason I can't see any of the pictures on this day. All the other pages are fine. I wonder if anyone else had a problem.

Hi
Thanks for that.
Flemish and Dutch are the same language. The formal name is Nederlands but that to some Belgian people is too close to "Nederland", the country from which Belgium separated in 1831.

That was an era, there and everywhere else, of limited literacy, not helped by Walloon insistence that Dutch shouldn't be spoken and still less written in the north.

The language therefore came close to collapse and, yes, many French words crept into colloquial speech.

But that era has long passed. Dutch is the official language of Flanders and, written, it is barely distuinguishable from the Dutch of the Netherlands. The difference isn't strong enough to call a dialect.

The accent, though, is different. Belgians tend to separate dipthongs, creating an extra syllable, and they tend to go up at the end of sentences where the Dutch typically go down.

Belgians also pronounce G without the guttural sound of the Dutch midlands, so that Ghent becomes more like Hent. But then that applies to the southern provinces of the Netherlands as well, so it's just a regional variation.

Dutch and Belgian people have no trouble understanding each other. They speak the same language.

Flemish language/dialect.
I grew up in Sarf Efrica and we were told that Flemish was a mixture of Dutch and French and was very similar to Afrikaans.

Mike