Friday, 10 September 2010
Weather report in my daily email newsletter sounded encouraging so we set off with high hopes for a dry day. From looking at our very un-detailed maps we imagined we could pick up the LF5 cycle path quite easily and so it was.
LF5 is an acronym for ‘landelijke fietspad number 5’ or country cycle path, there are many of those in Belgium and Holland and they try to lead you away from traffic as much as possible. Here, apart from one very muddy section, it consists of a beautifully tarred wide path along the river Schelde, a winding river through the lowlands of Vlaanderen ending in the busy port of Antwerpen.
Just like in France every village is dominated by a big church. Just after twelve we got to a place where the path crosses the river and there is supposed to be a ferry every half hour, except at lunchtime which meant we would have had to wait almost an hour. Fortunately there we met a friendly Belgian cyclist who got out his many maps and showed us how we could get another ferry downriver and also what we could expect further along the track.
When we got to the other ferry we only had 15 minutes to wait which we put to good use by having lunch.
The ferry is a small vessel, only for pedestrians and cyclist and always good fun, pity it only takes a few minutes to do the crossing.
You can see it was still very overcast with pretty impressive dark clouds but apart from a few spits and spats it was dry the whole day.
We now got on to a very winding and scenic part of the trail through the Schelde reserve with forests, some nice houses and the odd chateau…
…and then across the Schelde sluices and yet another ferry, aptly named ‘heen en weer (there and back) onto the final part of our journey to Mechelen.
After the shopping in Rumste we got to our destination, at least we thought so as I had figured out the waypoint using the address and Google maps. Lucky for us the person living at the address knew where the real Roosendael was and luckier still that it wasn’t far so we got there in good time with time to spare to do what I do best, pouring a glass of wine!
