With the medical emergency, we lost a month of cycling. (And by the way, the chance to be the 1000th blog on Cycleblaze. This blog turns out to be #1008.)

Rebooking the air flight turned out to be the simplest (but not cheapest!) part of the change.  Finding ourselves in Markranstadt about a month late meant that we would need a train to catch us up to where we would have been, in our chain of 80 or more hotel reservations, strewn across Europe at 50-70 km intervals. Among these, it turned out that our target now should be a hostel that we had booked in Brussels.

Taking a bike on a German train is usually no problem, though you have to book a spot for the bike, and pay a nominal fee, on the high speed ICE lines, anyway. But all that is for domestic travel. On most ICE that are going into another country, for some reason bicycles are not welcome. 

Brussels, of course, is in Belgium, and there even is an impertinent piece of Netherlands poking into some routings out of Germany. So now what?  We tried phoning Deutsche Bahn, but like most utilities, they never answer. So we hatched a different plan. We would take Deutsche Bahn as far as a the border, at Aachen. Then with a six km walk or pedal, we would be free, in oh,oh, Netherlands. Netherlands is clearly not Belgium , so no guarantee that a train from there would accept us either. 

That's where, with our characteristic "fine then!" attitude, we simply decided to pedal to Brussels.  And hey, while we were at it, we could detour past Waterloo, a historical site that has always fascinated Dodie. 

Given all that, The Plan now has this patched in routing, while everything in Germany and Netherlands and Belgium from before is scrubbed! It's  188 km (3 days) of pedaling instead of relaxing. So be it. We do also see that part of the way is along the famed Meuse. That will be fun!