Left Essex on Friday morning, got back Monday evening. In between: 718 miles, a Le Shuttle crossing, and four days of roads through Belgium and France that took in a favourite old lunch stop, the Ardennes, two cathedral towns, and a final day that turned properly serious once I reached La Coupole.
A lunch stop that’s become a habit
First proper stop was Le Joncquois in Soignies. I found it by accident on a Belgian road trip back in 2023, and it’s become the kind of place I now plan routes around rather than just pass through. Good food, no fuss, at exactly the point in a ride where getting off the bike for an hour actually matters. This trip was no different, Soignies at lunchtime, same as always.
Into the Ardennes
From there the roads properly open up. The Ardennes is the reason I own a bike in the first place: tight valleys, forested hillsides, towns that appear out of nowhere clinging to a riverbank. Dinant was the standout, a citadel cut straight into the cliff above the Meuse with the town stacked underneath it. I parked on the waterfront for a while just to look at it properly, which isn’t something I’m always good at on a trip like this.
Reims, then Amiens
The route south ran through Reims and across to Amiens, both built around cathedrals that make the word impressive feel a bit small. Standing next to one on a motorbike is a strange kind of scale check, centuries of stonework beside a machine that’ll do nought to sixty in around three seconds. I stopped more than I’d planned on this stretch, which is usually the sign of a route working properly.
The last day, and La Coupole
The final day stuck with me the most. La Coupole, near Saint Omer, is a huge concrete dome the Germans built during the war as a launch site for V2 rockets aimed at London. It’s a museum now, built into the structure itself, and it’s a genuinely sobering way to end a trip that had otherwise been about good roads and good food. Fifteen years in the Met dealing with the worst of what people do to each other doesn’t make a place like that easier to stand in. If anything, it makes the history land harder.
Why I keep doing these
Four days away from CCTV Aware and Metserve Media is nothing next to the six weeks I switch off every summer, but it does the same job in miniature. Get on the bike, put some distance between yourself and the diary, come back with a clearer head than the one that left. 718 miles isn’t a huge number as these trips go. It did exactly what it needed to.