Читать книгу One More Croissant for the Road онлайн

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Two-wheeled travel offered other pleasures, too. Coming up close and personal with big-eyed cows, and stopping to gaze at hot-air balloons as they drifted across the vast Belgian skies. Rounding a corner to find an immaculately tended Great War graveyard, the endless rows of neat white gravestones causing us to fall silent for the next few kilometres and feel glad to discover, mooching around a market the next morning, that life in Ypres hadn’t stopped in 1918. Scoffing cider and cake in an orchard outside Bruges, and making friends with an enormous slavering Bernese mountain dog as the owner lectured us on the folly of the British attitude to Europe (yes, even in 2014, that pot was already coming to the boil). Racing each other through the flat, gravelled trails of the Ardennes forest, and wandering, slightly bow-legged, through a misty Ghent at dusk, high on life after getting my tyres trapped in some tram tracks. Posing for photos by the sign to Asse, pointing saucily at our padded bottoms like Benny Hill’s backing band, as a couple of bemused locals clicked the shutter. And falling asleep in full gear on the Eurostar home with a tiny bottle of wine and a lingering sadness that it was over – and suddenly, I was a Cyclist.