Brussels and Leuven

Brussels

Evening accommodations: Hostel Van Gogh

As mentioned earlier, there are a severe lack of cycle routes in Brussels proper.  We decided to take the train into town, as our hostel the first night was right near Brussels Nord station.  As a result of the bombings, the main train station at the airport was closed, necessitating us walking through many buildings and structures to get to an off-site station.  We paid for our tickets and bike supplements (about 14EUR each), only to run into the first of many broken lifts to train platforms we needed, and teaching us how to take bikes on escalators.  Not fun.  Hint: if you turn the front wheel perpindicular and shove it as far forward on the step as possible, letting the back wheel sit on whatever step it falls on, it actually works OK.  Thanks to Carissa for that find!

Getting off the train, I found out that the maps I had cached on my phone didn't actually cache.  To make matters even worse, the station was off the top of the paper map we actually had.  After an hour of trial and error, we finally made our way onto roads on the map, and to our hostel that was less than a mile from the station!

Our bikes got their own parking spot under a lean-to in the garden, we got our room, then we proceeded to walk around town for the rest of the day.  We sampled quite a bit of Brussels' goods, myself the beer varieties, and Carissa the chocolate varieties.  A stop at a LBS was necessitated, the rain and grime of the shakedown weekend took a tool on Carissa's chain and it was squeaky, and I thought I needed a more substantial lock than I had brought (as it turns out, I actually didn't, but caution never hurt anyone).  Some fries, a jazz fest with some more local beer, and then some more beer later, and we were back at the hostel.  Carissa went to sleep, and I went to sample some more beer at the hostel biergarten, and took the tools to make some adjustments we noticed were required earlier in the day.  I also had some lively chats with a group of Spaniards, and a Minnesotian who wanted to talk about my fishing trips at Glacier Natonal Park.  I also fixed my cached maps problem.

Part of the Royal Palace complex

Overlooking Brussels

Mannekin Pis, Brussels most famous statue fo a little kid pissing

Nifty little Belgian pub

Jazz Festival at Grote Markt

They make nuts, bolts and tools out of Chocolate!

Delirium Pub 

Well worth a visit if you like beer, they have over 2000 different types

Leuven

Evening accommodations: Novotel Leuven Centrum

Sunday morning we woke up bright and early, and were on the move at 10, I mean 11, AM.  We biked back to the bike station, knowing the path and it being downhill, what took us an hour the day before took all of five minutes.  We had originally planned to train it to the outskirts of town and ride to Leuven, but the pain of getting bikes on and off the train, coupled with the fact that even if we unloaded them on the outskirts of Brussels where the trails started and rode them into Leuven still only meant a five to six mile ride, we just said screw it and took the train all the way to Leuven.

Waiting for the train

No one would ever tell us where to put the bikes, and somehow we kept ending up in the toilet car

We got off the train, to run into broke lift #2.  That pretty much meant the end of train stations for Carissa, even thought at least this one had the steps with the little rolling platform for cyclists.  Our hotel was a short ride from the train station, and directly across the road from the Stella Artois brewery.  Our bikes had their own caged indoor parking, and we had quite a lovely room.  After getting settled, we took the bikes into town for lunch.  We ran into a triathalon, and stopped for a few minutes, before finding some food in the Old Market area.  Still being jetlagged, we went back to take a nap, with the plans of returning in the evening for a bit more exploration and dinner.

Bikes outside the Leuven train station

Biking to running triathlon transition

Old town Leuven

Just a cool Peugeot I want

The Old Market was quiet on a rainy Sunday

Our bike's parking at Novotel Leuven Centrum hotel

 After napping, we returned to the city center.  We walked around the canal a bit, before going into a lovely little beer bar with the coolest dumbwaiter I've ever seen.  The bartender there had spent some time in Battle Creek, MI as a child, so we chatted with him for a while while sampling some local brews.  I didn't have time to try the third beer I wanted, so they sold it to me to go.  After that was dinner at a place called the Night Owl, about the only place open at 11PM on a Sunday night in that town, which I can best describe as eccentric.  It was also my introduction to hearing long strings of French, Flemish, or Dutch, interspersed with randomly vocalized English obscenities.

Canal in Leuven

Lots of bikes in the canal

Functional dumbwaiter to bring up beers from the cellar

Cellar visible through the floor

That beer does have an expiration date of 2035

The Night Owl, on the left

Retrieving our bikes

The Injury

So, back to that beer I bought to go.  My meal at the Night Owl finished, we left to head back to the hotel.  The beer, in my right cargo short pocket, we took off.  Mind you, Leuven is definitely a cobblestone city, and it was raining.  Coming around the corner from downtown, past the train station, on a sweeping left hand corner, I cut over a steel rain gutter a bit too shallow.  My back tire hit the cobblestone on the far side of the gutter, slid out, and I went down.  Hard.  Right on said beer bottle.

I felt liquid all over my leg.  My first thought was blood, so I reached down and felt broken beer bottle.  Oh, ok, only beer.  Then, oh crap, I can't drink my beer.  Then, Carissa showing up and telling me I'm bleeding, and me telling her no, its just beer.  Then, the dawning realization that broken glass next to my leg might mean more than beer, lifting up my short leg (which was already red), and seeing a flow of bright red.  Then,feeling a bit of sadness that it was a beer unique only to Leuven that I really wanted.  Then, the realization this was not good for the impending trip.

I was still well enough to ride, so we went back to the hotel.  They, of course, had closed parking, so I got to walk into the lobby in a bloody mess and ask them how to get in.  We parked the bikes, went up to the room, and assessed the damage.  Luckily, while looking for that missing camera, I came across an old first aid kit that I decided to pack just in case, and for once in a half dozen trips I was right to bring it.  Carissa turned what was sure to be a trip to the ER for stitches into a couple hour hotel patch job with a suture stip kit she found in it.