Am back in Dear Old Blighty. I have Very Bad News about the Tour, but more of that later.
My thoughts are that this will make a very good route but it needs some tweaking. Nights in both Bruges and Ghent meant hours and hours of time for sightseeing, and could better be replaced by a night in Ostend, which is a pretty cool place with lots of beaches and art on display. The Tour will be in July and a sunny Sunday spent pootling along the prom from de Panne to Ostend would be nice. You may, or may not, wish to while away an hour on that prom by hiring a bike that seats 12 people, all pedalling.
That would allow time the next day for lunch and a bit of sightseeing in Bruges, which is very pretty.
The route I rode needs some tweaking in quite a few places, particularly between Ghent and Leuven. We need to pass more cafes and spend zero time on muddy farm tracks on this day. I might go back and check this after the Brussels-Ostend overnight ride in May.
Leuven to Maastricht also needs tweaking and I might simply steal the successful
@Gordon P &
@redfalo route and reverse it.
After Eindhoven we pass a massive
Decathlon, stop for coffee and spend ages on a cycle track through woods, birdies going tweetie tweetie, all very nice.
There are lots of pretty, medieval towns with decent cafes for lunches and/or coffee. Oh, and an ancient hexagonal fort with a town inside it where we stop for lunch.
On the final day - a "two ferries" day - we ride through a massive industrial area with very impressive factories, loading facilities etc, for about 40 minutes. One for the infrastructure aficionados. It'll be a Saturday so there's no traffic at all and anyway almost the entire week's riding is on dedicated cycle paths. I think we shared a road with cars about 10 per cent of the time.
There is a fair bit of riding alongside canals but I suspect there won't be many objections to this because the tarmac is usually perfect, there's no traffic, and if the weather is hot and sunny - or windy - the trees give shelter.
Finally, I did have some doubts about a few of the surfaces, which in some places are less than perfect (think
cobbles). But riding across the car park at Harwich docks reminded me that we're used to riding in the south east and London. Nothing we're going to meet will deter us.
That's not the Bad News.
The Bad News is that, try as I might, I couldn't find a single hill anywhere. Sorry.
