la Roche en Ardenne is a popular enough destination for bods crossing via Calais / Holland-Belgium. It certainly makes a good point to aim for, for a three or four day break.
With this in mind, I have created a Garmin GPS route that goes Calais > la Roche > Calais and lumped two routes on top that I have stolen / borrowed from other sources, simply amending them to start and end in la Roche. The two routes lumped on top are:
1. RiDE magazine's day out, starting and ending in la Roche, via Spa
2. The Wallonia tourist office's day out in Wallonia, again starting and ending in la Roche but this time via Chimay
In short, route one goes one way (broadly eastwards in a circle) whilst route two goes broadly westwards, again in a circle. They are both about the same length at about 220 miles (so easy enough in a day) with RiDe's route being slightly shorter.
I have hosted the GPS friendly file on Dropbox.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mglrdnb43gljvt0/April 2018 - la Roche en Ardenne.GPX?dl=0
I haven't checked the routes fully, looking for glitches; hopefully they are not too bad. They should run and display on any device or software that is capable of accepting .gpx data. The file should open straight up in BaseCamp or Mapsource. If it doesn't and all you see is a mass of what looks like code, DO NOT PANIC. In the transfer between a Mac and Dropbox the .gpx file sometimes gains a .txt extension, changing it into a text file. Simply save the file to anywhere convenient, your desktop will do. Then, rename it by deleting the .txt bit ONLY and leave the rest as ending .gpx All should then be good to go.
Richard
PS Is any of this cast in stone or meant as a definitive ‘This is the way to go and what to do’? No, of course not. For example, I have assumed an overnight stop in St Omer before riding to la Roche the next day. You can do it all in one day, no problem.
Similarly, I have chosen to take the motorway between Calais and Cambrai on both the outward and return legs, the latter having a stop off in St Quentin for lunch. You could do both journeys without touching the motorway to / from Calais very easily.... and the alternatives are not all crap roads.
What I hoped to show is that it’s pretty easy to find good route suggestions in a number of places (these two just happened to come from RiDE and a freebie on Wallonia, both of which I’d saved) and - with a bit of imagination - mix them into something else. It would be very straightforward to plonk a Luxembourg circular route on top, pull it around a bit to bring in la Roche and you’d have another day added.
With this in mind, I have created a Garmin GPS route that goes Calais > la Roche > Calais and lumped two routes on top that I have stolen / borrowed from other sources, simply amending them to start and end in la Roche. The two routes lumped on top are:
1. RiDE magazine's day out, starting and ending in la Roche, via Spa
2. The Wallonia tourist office's day out in Wallonia, again starting and ending in la Roche but this time via Chimay
In short, route one goes one way (broadly eastwards in a circle) whilst route two goes broadly westwards, again in a circle. They are both about the same length at about 220 miles (so easy enough in a day) with RiDe's route being slightly shorter.
I have hosted the GPS friendly file on Dropbox.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mglrdnb43gljvt0/April 2018 - la Roche en Ardenne.GPX?dl=0
I haven't checked the routes fully, looking for glitches; hopefully they are not too bad. They should run and display on any device or software that is capable of accepting .gpx data. The file should open straight up in BaseCamp or Mapsource. If it doesn't and all you see is a mass of what looks like code, DO NOT PANIC. In the transfer between a Mac and Dropbox the .gpx file sometimes gains a .txt extension, changing it into a text file. Simply save the file to anywhere convenient, your desktop will do. Then, rename it by deleting the .txt bit ONLY and leave the rest as ending .gpx All should then be good to go.
Richard
PS Is any of this cast in stone or meant as a definitive ‘This is the way to go and what to do’? No, of course not. For example, I have assumed an overnight stop in St Omer before riding to la Roche the next day. You can do it all in one day, no problem.
Similarly, I have chosen to take the motorway between Calais and Cambrai on both the outward and return legs, the latter having a stop off in St Quentin for lunch. You could do both journeys without touching the motorway to / from Calais very easily.... and the alternatives are not all crap roads.
What I hoped to show is that it’s pretty easy to find good route suggestions in a number of places (these two just happened to come from RiDE and a freebie on Wallonia, both of which I’d saved) and - with a bit of imagination - mix them into something else. It would be very straightforward to plonk a Luxembourg circular route on top, pull it around a bit to bring in la Roche and you’d have another day added.
