July 9, 2023
Outbiking the Storm
Chimay to Haybes
Today I woke up at 6:00 a.m., feeling oddly completely rested, even though I had only gone to sleep at 10:00 p.m. I mean 8 hours of sleep as a normal amount for person, but I normally need more than a normal person, and I usually need more than normal for me when I've been biking all day for multiple days in a row. But, anyway, that's what it was.
This is good, because the weather forecast showed that it was supposed to start raining at 1:00 p.m. and basically continue until the we hours of the morning. Since I was up early, I meant that I could get into normal day of biking and be done early, before the rain started.
I only planned to see a little bit of Belgium on this trip, but it felt like it went by even faster than I expected. This was because Belgium, in my limited experience, consists almost entirely of bicycle super highways. I would call them like Velobahn or something like that. Which, yes, it was originally a rail line, but not every rails to trails project ends up feeling like a railroad to the bicycles as well. The pavement was very smooth, the grade was very flat, and it was almost always canopied in shade.
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An account of the extraordinary quality of Belgian bike routes (or route 8 in any event) I left the country by mid-morning, plowing through probably 40km in two hours.
Both border crossings into and out of Belgium were so lightly demarcated that I did not realize it was a border crossing until about 100 m past. And both cases it was a matter of seeing the flag of the country I was arriving in and being like "oh that's interesting that that flag is there"and then only after I started seeing street signs that were different that I realize that oh yeah that was the border crossing. So you will just have to imagine an ordinary European Street with a French flag next to it, and that's what happened.
Because of one Sunday 5 years ago, on my Normandy bike tour, when I had to survive on nothing but blackberries picked by the roadside and saucisson sec, I am always paranoid about food security on Sundays in France. I'm so paranoid that even on Saturday I kept thinking it was Sunday and I needed to buy food until Eivind had to tell me "You keep having this idea that it is Sunday, but it is Saturday." But now it actually was Sunday. I searched for one store that had Sunday hours, but it didn't open until 9:30 and I got there at 9:00. As much as I am afraid of starving to death on a Sunday in france, I was not going to wait around for a half an hour for a store to open.
Fortunately, the same town (Mariambourg, still in Belgium) was having a Sunday market. Often there will be a variety of small produce vendors, but this one just had one big fruit and vegetable vendor. Although they were three employees helping customers, and another one stocking, it seems like it was taking forever in order to get service. I also noticed that strangely (to me anyway) no one was touching any of the produce. I have on at least one occasion had a French produce store person snap at me for touching the food, so perhaps there's some similar system here? It seemed like most of the people who were talking to the employees were giving them whole long lists of items that they would then collect for them. I considered asking someone what the system was, but it was pretty apparent, and any doubt that I had was resolved by the expression on the face of an elderly woman standing next to me, clutching a 10 euro note. Starting with mild impatience, it progressed through full impatience, before transitioning to dismay over a 5-minute period while we were both waiting for service. As important is fruit and vegetables are, I had been eating a lot of them the last few days, and who knows how long this was going to take to just get one apple, two peaches, and a banana. So I kept walking through the market, and I bought half a chicken instead. If it neatly into my food bucket. And then cycled a little bit further along the bike path and at the next Belgian picnic table, I made myself four butter, chicken, and Mariolles sandwiches. Mariolles is a soft, semi stinky French cheese; I had bought it at about 3 days ago, and by now it was perfect. The sandwiches would be an obscene amount of fat and salt in any other context, but they were quite lovely food for someone biking most of the day, most days.
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Eventually I did make it to a market, just before it closed at 1:00 p.m., to get my peach, banana, and apple. So I didn't eat completely unhealthy. I'm actually eating the apple as I write.
By the time I had made all of my sandwiches for the day, and certainly by the time I was back in france, it was starting to get closer to that 1:00 p.m. time when supposedly there was going to be a gigantic thunderstorm and ...
At this point, of course, I started pedaling slightly faster. I was not terribly worried though because I had previously found a campsite in about 10 km at a town called Viereux-Wallerand. Unfortunately I seem to have made some sort of research error, because that campground was in fact an "aire de camping car", which is to say, an area for camping cars. Motorhomes. People with motorhomes have their own bathrooms, and so no showers, sleeping with sunscreen very icky, etc. So, on to the next campsite. I was now pedaling as fast as I could, considering that I had to keep it up for another 15 km. At this point I was extremely pleased to be fully fueled with chicken Mariolles sandwiches. I arrived in Haybes, which has a lovely municipal campground on the river. Six euros, hot showers, flat pitches of grass. It's only weird quirk of French bureaucracy is that you had to bike or walk 300m to another office in order to pay for the camping. But that office had delicious cold Ardennais cider so I guess that sort of makes up for it. I biked back and forth just as raindrops were starting to fall, and I got up my tent and threw all of my gear into it and then waited out the storm, which lasted about an hour. It's actually supposed to start raining again, it certainly looks like it:
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At this point it is also worth noting that there's nothing truly dangerous about a thunderstorm. I have rain gear. But it would have been very unpleasant, and very wet.
The forecast made it sound like it was going to be raining all night until 3:00 a.m., and the radar even looked like that that there's going to be another wave of storm. But at least as of 6:00 p.m. it hasn't arrived yet. I'm going to pack it in for the evening, get a lot of sleep, and get a very early start. I have been very much enjoying riding early in the mornings and watching the world wake up.
I don't really have many "other things I saw today" to post, but I did have one very beautiful butterfly or moth that joined me while I was making sandwiches and seemed extremely unafraid of my camera:
That's it for today.
Today's ride: 74 km (46 miles)
Total: 375 km (233 miles)
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