July 30, 2024
Day 17: Caves of Hotton
Bastogne, BE to Hotton, BE
Today was going to be outrageously hot approaching 90F in the afternoon and being over 80 by just 10 AM. The next couple days would be rainy. I set off in the morning with an intent to reach Brussels in two days but underestimated a bit.
Because I’m still in Wallonia, the southern part of Belgium, there are lots of rolling hills. In general I find sustained climbs a bit easier than rolling hills, mostly from the mental effort side as opposed to the physical effort side of things. There’s something easier about staying in the climbing mindset rather than having to come in and out of it.
Finally, I couldn’t find a reasonable campsite in the direction I wanted to go at the distance I wanted to go - it was 50km or 130 km.
In any case this information combined with heat and lack of campsites 90km out made me decide to take on a short day - just about 50km and go do some touristing and hang out indoors a bit.
This was a good decision - I ended up seeing a small town I otherwise would not have and especially let me flex my muscles of “go find a random roadside attraction”. I found the Caves of Hotton.
But more on that in a bit.
In the morning I met many a cow and tractor again, all friendly. The cows are probably thinking what’s this crazy lady doing biking in this heat, roughly at the same time as the crazy lady thinking to herself what am I doing biking in this heat.
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Around 1030 I had my first minor mechanical of the trip. It was fairly straightforward but I noticed something wrong where one of the front brackets was completely coming loose. I had admittedly taken a shortcut installing it but I was confused as to how the bolt can just rattle out like this - just vibrations from all the bad cobblestone paths? I just screwed it back in and all has been fine since.
For lunch to escape the heat I had a restaurant meal in La Roche en Ardennes, another picturesque small town with a castle. The server was also a saint and filled my bottle with cold water even though I would have been happy with any tap water.
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I also made note of a few other things I keep seeing in France and Belgium in case it is interesting to read up on in the future.
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3 months ago
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Finally towards 1400, the heat was getting too much and I decided I didn’t have another 60km in me so will just pick the early campsite. I also saw that there’s a tourist attraction Caves of Hotton if I’m willing to ascend another 200 meters up. I went for it and had another ice cold drink while awaiting the guided tour.
In short the tour was pretty impressive. We went to a depth of about 90 meters into the cave and saw lots of cool limestone formations and crevasses. As the only English speaker, the guide to my benefit told his entire spiel directly to me for English- the other two spiels were in Dutch and French. At the end of the tour I expressed a little surprise that one person gave all 3 language tours (in Heidelberg it was totally separate guides). He grinned that Belgium is a difficult country.
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The night ended with another campsite but another luxury of a restaurant meal and several cold nonalcoholic beers. I think it will be hard to tour parts of the world that are not fanatic about nonalcoholic bread soda like me now. I’ve gotten to try so many kinds!
Today's ride: 48 km (30 miles)
Total: 1,309 km (813 miles)
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3 months ago