After a long stage 1 on the saddle in massive headwinds, we were hoping for a light second day – but oh boy, we were wrong. The plan for the day contained about 160 km of riding, but very limited hills – except for one, that I will come back to later.
We started out after a nice breakfast at 09, and to our dissapointment, the weather looked grim. We had a rainy forcast and wind from west, meaning bang on side-wind. As we headed out south, we managed to use the wind to our advantage and we got quite quckly towards De Panne – but just before we were about to stop for a coffee in De Panne the sky broke and we had heavy rain. After ten minutes or so hiding inside, we went back out with rain jackets on ready to face a more stormy weather.
The route in Belgium was on brilliant roads, most of it on dedicated cycling paths. However, when we crossed the boarder into France, then we were met with more roadside cycling. Nevertheless, we got down to Dunkirk in good conditions and dropped by many interessting historical places from the second world war like Fort des Dunes.
From Dunkirk we turned our nose inland till we reached 80 km we got into a more hilly landscape. Most of the ride still was between corn fields and in beautiful landscape – but then we were met by Kemmelberg. In the bottom of the hill we met some locals who had suffered a puncture – they asked us if we were planning to head up that hill with our bikepacks. We simply said yes – but we were soon to understand that 17% incline was rought. The hill was not long, but the cobbles took all our of us, and I managed to hit a new max heart rate!
After climbing Kemmelberg, we headed towards Roubaix – and after about six and a half hours of effective riding, we were done for the day.
