Conquering the Belgian cycling routes

Are you in love with cycling, and just waiting for one thing: getting on your bike to get your energy up, set off to explore new roads and fascinating landscapes? In that case, you need to know the dedicated bike routes that will allow you to ride safely according to your level.

To help you with choosing the right path, Rask suggests you some tracks ...

At the beginning, you could get your hands on the few roads behind the park of Tervuren, at the departure of the "National Golf", the Golf of Sterrebeek, or explore the forest of Soignes from the station of Groenendael. The latter is composed of roads suitable for bicycles and several paths dedicated to mountain bikes and on which getting lost is a real pleasure. The same goes for the domain of the Château de la Hulpe, which hosts a number of ideal paths for cyclists and mountain bikers.

If you want to take your performance to the next level, there is the F3; a bicycle path that takes you into the city centre of Leuven. Running along the railway for 30 kilometres, this route is very flat and therefore very accessible.

Still starting from the capital, you could take a 70-kilometre route to Boom, a village in the province of Antwerp. Along the canal, it is almost completely flat and easily accessible.

Of course, there are large numbers of cycling circuits located outside the Belgian capital.

• You will find, for example, a path along the canal around Ronquière.
• You might just as well venture to the surroundings of Nivelles, on paths at the crossroads of fields and beautiful landscapes.
• There are also a number of roads in the vicinity of Sint-Pieters-Leeuw that can be reached by following the canal from Brussels all the way to the south.
• For a more intense getaway with more hills, you can discover the very beautiful course located along the golf of Bercuit, near Wavre.
• Numerous Ravels have left here and there throughout Belgium, from Namur to Holland and from the North Sea to Brussels. For more ideas and inspirations, do not hesitate to visit the Ravels de Wallonie website by clicking here. (link to the site: https://ravel.wallonie.be)
• The most daring among us will also be able to embark on an even more ambitious adventure by joining the North Sea from Brussels, at the bend of Gent and Bruges. A 100-kilometre cycle path has been built along the canal between these two cities specifically for this purpose.

To plan your bike trips and adapt them to your level and to always discover new places to explore, some websites and applications are certainly worth to be examined. Rask has listed some of them for you:

• Komoot (link to: https://www.komoot.fr/guide/559/itineraires-en-velo-de-course-en-belgique) offers you many tours for free according to your desires in terms of time, difficulty, distance and starting point. All you have to do is enter your preferences into the application and it will suggest suitable routes. The tool also indicates the elevation difference for each route.

If you don't need this data, just consider that up to 100 meters of elevation gain per 10 kilometres, the route is relatively easy and accessible; above this measurement, the route is hilly and therefore become more difficult. 

• The Strava application (https://www.strava.com/) is also very powerful and allows you to see the comments of cyclists who have already ridden the suggested route. The only disadvantage of this tool is that you will have to subscribe to it to take full advantage of it. 
• Garmin offers you tools for creating itineraries: you indicate your starting point, the distance you would like to ride and the direction you want to go. Consequently, the application will suggest nice tours to ride according to your expectations. However, in order to take full advantage of the tool, you will need to create an account. If you have a connected watch or a GPS, you could then download these routes or save them on your device.

Oh yes and by the way ... one last advice: don't hesitate to get lost! The most beautiful path is probably the one that you discover by yourself when you leave the circuit to venture into forests or country roads...