Sunday 17th

 

Breakfast on the Grand Place in Brussels with coffee and gaufres after a short walk from our overnight stop in Kortrijk. Mmmm the delicious smell of freshly waffled gaufres! They set us up for a great walking day. More people have joined us, we're now 54, some of them great walkers. The more the merrier: their fresh encouragement had us swinging through Belgium, past my grandmother's door in Leuven (although she knew it as Louvain) and over the border to The Netherlands where we had a small altercation at the customs post resulting in some of us having to hand over our ham sandwiches.

Passing through the centre of Maastricht we reminisced about John Major and his Spitting Image avatar, the Grey Man.Once into Germany, we skirted to the north of Aachen and stopped for a break in Düren. This, we discovered, was once one of the wealthiest cities in Germany but it was flattened by Allied bombers in November 1944. The good citizens rolled up their sleeves and rebuilt so we were able to enjoy strammer max mit pommes under the restored walls of Schloss Burgau.

We arrived at the birthplace of Haribo's Gummibears, Bonn, in the early afternoon and took the opportunity to visit the Beethoven Haus to wish Ludwig a belated happy 250th birthday last year.

In spite of the dark and the threat of snow, we marched on at a great rate. We were tempted to stop in Eslarn, east of Nurenburg but we were so close to the border that we pressed on into the Czech Republic and stopped to camp in a barn 761.5 miles from Upton Bishop.

Quite an achievement!

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