A balancing act

31st March – 4th April 2026

We departed our final Premier Inn of the trip early in the morning on Tuesday 31st March – no time for an all you can eat buffet breakfast this time. The ferry itself was all a bit of a blur. I think I fell asleep for a bit. I had been adamant that there would be other cyclists on the ferry but Holly was right – it was either too early, too cold, or they were on a nicer ferry route than Dover to Dunkirk, which seemed to be a popular route with the lorry drivers.

Once we disembarked in France, we cycled past some makeshift refugee/migrant camps which looked pretty rough in the cold at this time of year, with acrid smoke drifting towards us from the various things they were burning to stay warm. 

As we only had a few hours in France before we crossed over into Belgium, we stopped off in the first bakery we came across to buy some coffee eclairs and pastries. The irony of this paragraph coming after the previous one is not lost on me. 

My bum was already beginning to hurt.

We stopped at the border and had a quick chat with a German dad and his three sons who were cycling from Cologne to London, and were worried about the big hill that awaited them in Dover. We wouldn’t have any hills for a while. In fact, the cycling infrastructure was so good in Belgium that the easy but long and straight cycle paths along the rather industrial canal side soon became mind (and bum) numbingly boring. Number plated e-bikes regularly came whizzing past us and we began to resent their, in our opinion unearned, speed. Every now again mopeds would come past us too, but unlike the UK where their presence on bike paths could mean people of a younger generation up to no good, here it was usually older folk who didn’t seem to mean us any harm.

It seemed we had arrived just a few days before a lot of the campsites were open, which led to some longer days than initially planned, which in turn resulted in some late finishes and inevitable bickering. It was also freezing at night which made getting up in the mornings all the harder, and Holly had a cold. 

It didn’t feel like we had got the balance right yet, with not enough time to decompress in the evenings. Perhaps 100km a day was too ambitious.

Our longest day, a 147km 8hr 42min schlep in Belgium, hammered this home. Our route included going through a very strange tunnel to cross the river in Antwerp, which involved cramming our bikes into a lift along with other bikes and mopeds and which then moved us diagonally to the next level – “welcome to Antwerp” a friendly Dad quipped to us as we travelled on the slant. All jolly good fun, but it would be another few hours and gone 10pm before we finally reached our campsite, Holly’s knee giving her gyp the final few kilometres in the dark.

After we crossed into the Netherlands, both the scenery and the weather improved and we started to feel more positive about everything. We were only there for one night before crossing into Germany, which again we both immediately liked. We treated ourselves to a meal out due to the shops being closed for Easter – I had Devil’s Sausage and Holly had a very healthy Buddha Bowl, which I think tells you everything you need to know about our respective preferences and priorities.

A shorter day followed so we could see Holly’s friend Nadja, do some laundry and charge up our electrics at her place, before heading into Bonn for a walk and some dumplings and noodles. It was all very nice but I was tired (and ill) and it still felt like we weren’t getting the balance right in terms of rest/cycling/logistics. We’d take a look at the route and daily distances when we next had a rest day, but for now we were happy to be out in the increasingly hot and sunny weather.