Louvain-la-Neuve

Louvain-la-Neuve, the artificially created city in the middle of the woods, where the French-speaking students from Leuven found a new home 50 years ago.

On Monday 15/03/2021 - 09:00 we set off with four cyclists from Houtemveld in Tienen for a vigorous ride to the student city of Louvain-la-Neuve.

As for the weather, I have played with better cards.

At the start, we had a bit of light drizzle, but the sun soon broke through.

This made cycling at times even pleasant.

The strong wind (4 Bf) was quite capricious today, so we had to contend with fairly strong headwinds almost the entire ride, either straight on or at an angle.

We also encountered a couple of short, not too intense rain showers, especially on the way back.

Mostly without much trouble, but around 15:00 near Thorembais-Saint-Trond, we did have to seek shelter under the bridge over the E411.

Due to the somewhat poorer weather combined with a relatively high number of elevation meters and the numerous cobblestone stretches, some of which were of very inferior quality, the ride was indeed quite tough overall. So the initially assigned rating of 4 on a scale of 1 to 10 was certainly justified.

However, I was riding with very seasoned cyclists who smoothly handled all these obstacles along the way, allowing us to reach Tienen as planned just after 17:00 without any problems.

In a beautiful park forest, the Bois de la Palette, in the middle of the city of Louvain-la-Neuve, we had our picnic lunch on a bench enjoying the lovely winter sunshine.

Rob's thermos once again did its job well, and we quickly had hot coffee with our sandwiches.

Louvain-la-Neuve is a pleasant city to cycle through, quite hilly yet also with a lot of green areas, a beautiful pond with majestic swans, and a nice shopping center.

Due to the corona issues, the ever-busy crowds of rushing students were much less this time, allowing us to cycle smoothly through the center.

We cycled 91.5 km at an average speed of 14.8 km/h.

We had to overcome 641 elevation meters to get the job done, especially on the outbound trip.

In total, we spent 6h10 on our bikes and were away from home for over 8 hours.