Ardennes Arbalète - Day 3 - Houffalize - Bergueme

This is the route we biked today

We got up early at 07:00 as we had planned a 60km / 1300hm trip. We started with a climb to Houffalize and our spirits were high.

We stopped in Houffalize to get breakfast and prepare lunch. There was an ideal spot at the parking to prepare everything.

After this we noticed a resupply stop for the Belgian Mountainbike Challenge and had a chat. It’s a competition were 400 people try to be the fastest during stages in 4 days. We weren’t sure how many times we would cross their route so we decided to continue. The trails were nice with a couple of cool challenges.

At a certain point we were surprised by a motorbike who indicated that we should get out the way. We weren’t sure what to expect and continued pedalling. After some other motorbikes we noticed bikes coming downhill really fast and we had to scramble to get to the side of the road. During that process i fell and hurt my knee (not too bad luckily). After a while we decided to go back downhill and rode to a cafe to get our bearings.

When we were at a cafe we got acces to internet, found the gpx files of the competition and rerouted to try and avoid as much as possible. At this point it was 13:30 so we lost quite some time.

With the help of Komoot we did have a nice route to get to our camping at Bergueme. We ended up at around 1000hm so it was still a pretty heavy day! As the camping didn’t have any restaurant we cycled another 8km through some nice fields to get some yummy fries and burgers.

I’m happy that we didn’t get hurt (we made the right decision to turn around!) and that we found a nice route.

Have a good night everybody!