After a good breakfast, we take the road towards Lille, tonight we sleep in France, it feels very weird. Our Warmshower host advised us a nice route to reach Lille, we'll follow his advice. We start by joining a bicycle path along an old railway. Soon we arrive at the foot of a famous Flanders hill which we didn't know existed yesterday: the Koppenberg. It's the steepest hill of the Tour of Flandres, it's paved with cobblestones and has a section as steep as 22%. Luckily we don't need to take it but François decides to accept the challenge and climb it with his 30kg of luggage. He climbs it to the top without pausing before descending and continue along the tracks.
Soon after we reach 8500km. Small
problem, the screen of our camera doesn't work anymore, we take
pictures without knowing if they are recorded and without being able to
see what we are photographing. So we are doing a blind selfie hoping it's a good one. The next part of our route runs along the Espières canal to France. We are on the towpath, we don't have to think about which way to take, it's nice.
After a few kilometers passersby say "Bonjour", we left Flanders, we are in Wallonia. Then suddenly the towpath coating changes and that's it we're in France. We continue to follow the canal which is now called the Canal de Roubaix. We arrive then very quickly at our Servas hosts very close to the old Lille. We spend a pleasant evening.
The next day we visit the center of Lille. It's very pretty, especially since our hosts have provided us with a tour around the remarkable buildings of the old Lille, really convenient. We take the opportunity to buy a new camera, so we can see what we are photographing.
