[MrsC_772]

Day 2 - Sunday 26 June

A long day: 400km, 4 countries, 3 fuel stops and no motorways so slow progress, with rain on and off all day. First fuel stop was at the first station after the Chunnel (because muggins forgot to fill up in Folkestone the night before). Expensive and the only 95 octane was E10. My bike (unlike Andy's 695) gets grumpy on super unleaded (the engine was in a mood for a week after I gave it the Tesco super) so filled it with the plonk. Hope one tank isn't enough to induce tank mumps.

When crossing northern France I alternate between gritting my teeth, paying the tolls and hitting the motorway, and thinking there must be a better alternative (which in practice usually leads me to long for the motorway again).Satnav route (culled from Ride magazine) started by leading me along canals to get away from Calais, watching the local anglers & cyclists. Hacked through Lille, where my planned road being closed for some sort of street fair led to me ride in circles round a one way system clearly designed by someone who'd been on the limoncello big time. Euro footie championship clearly in evidence - lots of German fans wandering around.

Got lots of waves from fellow bikers passing through one town in the border zone - clearly an organised rally or ride-out, almost every single one waved. (Maybe it's a way of saying "we know the roads here are dull, but it's still good to see a fellow biker").

By early afternoon I was (a) in Belgium, and (b) getting quite peckish. I thought there'd be a simple solution - chips. What I hadn't expected was pretty much every friterie being closed due to it being Sunday. I thought the eating of chips was more of a national religion in Belgium than organised religion, but no. At one point I saw customers in a cafe, but when I turned up at the counter I was told they'd stopped serving.

Eventually, at about 4pm, I found my salvation, in the form of a strawberry custard tart. Not for the first time, when all else in Francophone Europe is closed, the boulangerie patisserie remains open. It appears the Walloons are as wedded to the need (knead?) for continuous access to baguettes as the French, so I found a cake shop, spilled icing sugar down my waterproofs and drank mediocre coffee.

Second fuel stop of the day was somewhere in Belgium, where at least there was a choice between normal 95 and plonk.

With around 100km to go, I was getting to the small-child-on-back-seat-of-car "are we nearly there yet" stage. However, around 35km from my hotel, a miracle happened: Luxembourg.

Part of my aim on this WDW tour was to visit new places, and having never been to Luxembourg (and read one or two good things about it in a bike magazine and on the other Ducati forum), I'd booked a hotel in Vianden.

Immediately over the border, the tarmac quality improved immensely. In my version of biker heaven (more on that later) the roads would definitely be surfaced by the Luxembourgeois. Bends swinging through wooded hillsides, hardly any other vehicles around, smooth tarmac and the cheapest petrol I've found in Europe - what's not to like?

Checked into my hotel, had a pizza the size of a bike wheel topped with garlic & the blandest capsicums known to science, washed down with a German weissbeer, and went for a wander round the historic town centre. There's a river, a pretty hilltop castle, and the Luxembourgeois still seem to build stuff with proper round castle-ish towers.

The hotel staff had switched effortlessly between German & French. When I saw a road sign, I realised why perhaps the Luxembourg dialect hadn't really caught on. A road called, in French, "Rue de la Frontiere" in Luxemburgish was "Ruoder Wee" which frankly sounds like what the Mannequin Pis is doing in Brussels!