Thursday 28th June 2018
We are up with the sun and leave the campsite at Guines at 08:30. It has been a warm night and the day looks promising. By the time we reach the Belgian border an hour later it is getting decidedly warm.
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| Mick loves his puffy coffee |
But first we have a lovely ride through rural France, the villages just waking up and traffic starting to build. We ride through St Omer and bypass Lille before joining the E42 motorway for the long drag across Belgium. And drag it is as first one set of roadworks and then another reduce the traffic to long crawling snakes on the superheated tarmac. We are sweating heavily as we filter slowly through the jams. Most drivers move over a little to let us through once they finally glance in the mirror and see bike, then engage brain and move over to let us pass.
At one set of narrowed lanes through the roadworks we come up behind an escorted wide load. Some sort of prefabricated building on a flatbed truck. It straddles both lanes and there would be room enough for a bike to pass but not wide enough for the line of cars stretched out behind it. And the lanes are too narrow for us to filter through to it so we spend a frustrating half hour inching along with a view of empty road stretching ahead and blocked off to us by the cars in front. Whose dumb idea was it to send a wide load through in the middle of the day?
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| Camping on the banks of the River Sure |
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| US tank on display in Bastogne |
At long last we leave the motorway for the ride south down the N4 to Luxembourg. We stop for coffee in Bastogne at a cafe in the square where we have stopped many times before. Then into Luxembourg to the High Chapparal bar and camping, another venue where we have stopped many times before. We are nothing If not creatures of habit.
The High Chapparal in Heiderscheidergrund, Luxembourg is another favourite haunt.
It's a biker bar and restaurant with camping and lies on the banks of the very pretty River Sure. We've stayed here on numerous tours in the past and are warmly greeted by proprietor Ed, a Harley rider who originally hails from the Netherlands.
We soon hve the tents set up on the river bank and head over to the bar for food and more football. England are playing Belgiumin a world cup group game. Both teams are already qualified for the later rounds so there is not a ot riding on the game. England lose 1-0.
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| Mick gets set up for the footie |
Then it's spare ribs time, a speciality of the house.And finally to bed as it grows dark. We fall asleep to the sound of the River Sure babbling away in the background.
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| Spare ribs and footie |
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| In the bar at the High Chapparal |
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