It has been a dream for years to climb the cobbles of Tour the Flanders, and therefore we decided do dedicate a day to only cycle in the area around Oudenaarde. I can really recomend to stay in that city for at least two nights, just to take in the biking atmosphere of the area – I almost feels like the whole city bleeds cycling.
Starting out from the Hotel Leopold, a common stating spot for cyclists, we headed towards Oude Kwaremount – we have tried it the day before too, but this day we decided to leave the bikepacks in the hotel room to lower the weight of our bikes. Dropping those approx 8 kg from the seat was definetly worth it with all the climbes ahead of us!
From the top of Oude Kwaremont, we went stratight to Paterberg – a short but very steep cobble climb. On our way there, we got company of many people on e-bikes, which we laer found out was a very common way of tacking the cobbles in the area around Oudenaarde – a to be honest, a much more chill way to expereience them compared to stiff normal roadbikes with high profile carbon wheels.
Paterberg was short, but we were definetly not done yet – and next up was Koppenberg. With almost double the length of Paterberg, and an even higher gradient on the steepest part . our legs were already starting to hurt.
Next up, antoher of the famouse climbes – a category 4 – Kruisberg taking us out of the city of Ronse where we had a short stop for a coffee and what we though was a bad mechanical break on one of the bikes after hitting one of the cobbles very hard – but turned out to be false alarm. The Kruiseberg climb was rough, but the fact that we had a rest before it, made it much easier.
From here we were on our way back to Ouudenarde, but we were not ready to go back to the hotel yet, so we decided to for Oude Kwarmont, Paterberg and Koppenberg one more time – just to give it a go and set a best effort time for Strava.
It went quite well – we both set personal records on the last climbs – which was great way of finalzing our mini Tour de Flanders – and getting a perspecitve of both the speed and stamina of those pro cyclists!
If you want to try out the route – you can find it by exporting the GPX and upload it to your Garmin here.
