Tour of Flanders cycling route: blue loop

For friends of well-groomed cobblestones: Oude Kwaremont, Paterberg and Koppenberg in one! It is worth it!

The Tour of Flanders is to the Belgians what King's Day is to the Dutch. Every village around the Tour of Flanders route is colorfully decorated with Flemish flags, banners and large TV screens. We visited this Flemish folk festival. First to experience the brutal climbs for yourself, then to see how the pros fared. Read the whole story in Let's Ride Bikes #1 2023!

Today we did a little bit of the Ronde. Taking on 4 of the classic cobbled climbs. To pedal in the wheels of the pros took my respect for them to a whole new level. Once again Belgium has provided some amazing routes to ride.

5th day of the Tour of Flanders by bike. Finally unloaded with luggage, but very full of desire to travel the roads and walls that have made the history of cycling. And finally a ride and not a straight line, which gives that particular pleasure of returning home, of returning to the starting point. The route is one of those proposed by the Tour of Flanders center website (https://www.crvv.be/) and winds through the hills of the Flemish Ardennes. The blue, shorter, is the one with the most historic cobbled walls (Kwaremont, Paterberg, Koppenberg, Kluisberg, just to name a few) and gives a good overview of these climbs as iconic as they are feared. The red instead, which we will do the next day, has fewer paved sections, but is more demanding in terms of duration and height difference and still has the beautiful, indispensable wall of Geraardsbergen/Grammont as its fulcrum. There is also a yellow route, but it seems quite flat and not very interesting from an altitude point of view, perhaps proposed to enthusiasts who have little training. Compared to expectations, it cannot be said that this tour is particularly demanding. Sure, there are walls with really steep slopes in some points, but still not such that you have to get off your bike and push. Sure, you need a minimum of physical and mental preparation to face them, but you can also decide to get off and push to the limit: no one forces anyone and you have to ride a bike a bit as everyone likes. The cool thing however is that these walls appear suddenly, almost unexpectedly. Surely the altimetric profile of the Garmin and the writing of the various challenge-climbs of Strava on the road help not to remain unprepared and dazed and change at the right time, but perhaps they take away a bit of...poetry. Compared to the proposed tour, which cuts off the top of the Kluisberg, we decide to do it. I wonder why they didn't include it. We conclude the tour with an unloading along the Flemish countryside and with an orangina/cappuccino in the center of the Ronde. In the afternoon we will go to visit the center and do some cycling shopping. The next day we would plan the final route with bags from Oudenaarde to Brussels which includes other walls, including that of Grammont. It would be nice to close the tour started in Brussels, but instead we wonder if it would not be more appropriate to do the red tour proposed by the exhaust center, go home, prepare the bikes with bags and then reach Brussels by train, thus closing in style and managing to pay homage the Grammont wall. Yes, maybe that's the best thing to do.