London to Holland

We headed from London to Dover then through France, Belgium and Holland on this week-long cycle adventure.

Distance: 300 miles ish
Terrain: Hilly from London to Dover but beautifully flat once you’re the other side of the Channel.
Time: 5-6 days of cycling

This is an interesting trip for cycling enthusiasts taking in a few notable places. The cycle paths from Dunkirk onwards are all really good and traffic is considerate. We plotted our own routes from Dunkirk onwards and managed to avoid getting lost or picking up any punctures.

The routes below aren’t the most direct but are pretty quiet and make good use of bike lanes. If you follow any beware that there’s a couple of places where the Garmin took us down a one-way street the wrong way so we got off and walked for 100m or so to avoid going off-route and getting lost.

London to Dover

The hardest day of cycling by far. Set off early on a weekend to avoid the traffic getting out of London. Once you’re outside the M25 the route is much nicer and the traffic calmer. We followed a route I found here which takes you on the quieter country roads. There’s some big climbs over the Kent Downs as you get closer to Dover and I had a very near miss with a 4×4 coming the other way up a narrow lane as I was going downhill.

We were aiming for the advertised 7:15 ferry to Dunkirk and arrived in Dover at 6pm, but discovered there is no 7:15 ferry and the 8pm ferry wasn’t running. So we had an anticlimactic five hour wait in Dover because of delays to the ’10pm’ ferry that was running. Tip: check ahead. When the ferry did arrive, we were the only cyclists getting on it.

We slept in Dunkirk at a Campanile hotel just a couple of miles from the port. They have a 24 hour reception, which was handy for our late arrival and they let us keep our bikes in an empty conference room overnight.

[Forgot to press start on the Garmin so this route is from just after the M25]

Dunkirk to Roubaix

This route took us to Belgium and then back into France again. France on a Sunday is generally a bit closed everywhere, but there’s a town on the France-Belgium boarder called Oost-Cappel where I fell off my bike that served as a good lunch stop. Nobody spoke English but luckily I know enough French to order chips and a beer.

We also stopped at Ypres, a very pretty town with a lot of history and home to the Menin Gate which is worth stopping at. If we were to do the trip again we’d probably have stayed here overnight instead of Roubaix and seen the Last Post ceremony which happens at 8pm each night.

Instead we headed to Roubaix (avoiding the famous cobbles of the Paris-Roubaix race). There’s an art gallery that looks fantastic in Roubaix that is housed in an old swimming pool. Sadly it’s closed on Sundays and Mondays so we didn’t get to see inside.

We slept at a nice B&B where the lovely owner let us keep our bikes in the garden.

[Garmin data in two halves]

Roubaix to Ghent

In theory this should have been a nice relaxed cycle – the route was simple heading straight down a canal from Roubaix to Ghent. Unfortunately there was a headwind all the way which we couldn’t escape from. Still, overtaking barges on the canal was nice.

There wasn’t anywhere immediately available to have lunch, though a small diversion off the canal would allow you to find somewhere. We’d loaded up on food at a supermarket before leaving Roubaix so stopped for a picnic. The route finishes by Ghent cathedral where we stayed at the Ibis. We locked our bikes up in their underground car park before heading off to sample some beers.

Ghent to Domburg

In planning this route I’d not noticed that it took us on a passenger ferry. We stopped just over the border into Holland and ate the packed lunch acquired from a bakery we passed just outside Ghent. I looked at my phone and realised we had to get a ferry that went once an hour so we had a fast few miles of pedalling to get to it.

The ferry was about 6 Euros and is just for people and bikes. We cycled off the other side into the town just as people were leaving work and had our first taste of why cycling in Holland is so great – the cars were yielding to bikes at pretty much every turn.

Our route then traced the coast round to Domburg along the back of some impressive sand dunes. For the last few miles our route took us along the sea wall and into some 30mph winds. This was by far the hardest part of the trip but we were rewarded with a rest day the next day and two nights in our lovely B&B.

Domburg to Rotterdam

This is a pretty spectacular cycle across the Dutch delta. The first bridge was around five miles long – you’re literally cycling over the sea. There’s two further, slightly shorter, bridges and a lot of tracing the coast alongside beaches.

We stopped in a really pretty village called Goedereede for lunch by a canal (the benefit of Strava is looking up the places you stumbled across). It was a really hot day and the last leg into Rotterdam seemed to take forever. To our surprise the route took us to a lift, down which was a bike tunnel under the river. It was really exciting cycling under the river and another example of brilliant Dutch cycling infrastructure.

We stayed for two night at a very funky hotel that let us keep our bikes inside. We’d originally planned to cycle on to Amsterdam the next day but the hotels were full (it was Friday night and we’d left it late) so we stayed two nights here and caught the train to Amsterdam for a day instead. I really liked Rotterdam – especially the Pelgrim Brewery. Apparently there’s a marathon in town next April. Maybe I’ll be back.

We returned to London via an overnight ferry from the Hook of Holland to Harwich. It leaves at 10pm and arrives at 6:30am. There’s a train that meets the ferry and takes you straight into London, but unfortunately this had been replaced by a coach on the morning we arrived and our bikes couldn’t get on it. We waited for the first train, which became three trains to get back home. It probably would have been quicker to cycle.

Here’s some pictures from the trip.