Cycling from Brussels to Bruges

I learned in May that doing a hard thing together with your partner—a thing that stretches you, a thing you think that maybe you can’t actually do—is a good way to take your relationship out for a ride, so to speak. 

I imagine for some it would make fault lines more evident, break things; in our case, it drew us closer together, taught me more about what “doing something together” actually feels like, when you sink into it, and ended up being loads of fun.

From the morning of May 11, 2026 to the afternoon of May 16, 2026, Lisa and I cycled from Brussels to Bruges. It was Lisa’s 60th birthday present to me.

Neither of us had ever cycled anywhere farther than across to Stratford and back until a month ago; facing up to the prospect of cycling more than 50 km in a day—like cycling to Borden from Charlottetown, in Island terms—was daunting. Visions of exhaustion, tire punctures, cycling in driving rain, and simple overwhelm, danced in my head. It wasn’t like we were proposing to climb the Matterhorn, but for us this was going to be a stretch.

Here’s how we did it.

Booking a Cycle Tour

We booked the tour through Calgary-based 10Adventures, which, in turn, outsourced local logistics to Belgian Bike Tours. 

We were happy to have a Canadian contact to arrange things for us, and to pay in Canadian dollars; we were happy to have a Belgian contact arranging the tour, booking hotels, providing route information, ferrying our luggage from hotel to hotel, and acting as an emergency contact if needed.

It certainly wasn’t the cheapest way to cycle from Brussels to Bruges, but this was our first long-distance cycle tour, and we wanted to shave off as many of the things we could shave off to let us just focus on the cycling.

How It Worked

The tour started with an overnight in Brussels, followed by 6 days of cycling, ending with an overnight in Bruges. 

The tour booking included 7 nights of hotels (with breakfast), bicycle rental, route planning, and luggage delivery. 

Every morning we’d drop our luggage at the hotel front desk, head out for a day of cycling, and our luggage would be at our next hotel when we arrived.

Where We Cycled

The route was deliberately choosen to not simply be a straight shot, but rather a mix of villages, towns, cities, and countryside. 

From Brussels we cycled to Mechelen, a mid-sized city, then to Antwerp, to the rural community of Dendermonde, then Ghent, then the town of Maldegem, and finally to Bruges. 

We found the route remarkably well-curated, and we enjoyed the daily mix of different scenery and surfaces (we generally did not enjoy cobblestones, which, fortunately, were rare).

The route was FLAT, very flat. Here’s what the elevation profile looked like:

After some hilliness getting out of Brussels, we were essentially cycling on straight ahead, with almost no ups or downs.

Here’s how our days broke down:

Day by day it looked like this:

Wednesday distance was short: the weather forecast included rain, wind, thunder and lightning, and possibly hail. We weren’t eager to be trapped in the middle of rural Belgium in that, so we opted to spend the bulk of the day in Antwerp, and took the train to Dendermonde (ironically, via Mechelen, where we’d been the day before), meaning we only had a short ride from the Dendermonde rail station to our B&B.

Friday the distance was also shorter than expected: Lisa took a fall off her bike, on slippery cobblestones, on Thursday evening, as we were nearing our Ghent hotel. She hurt her wrist and her shoulder, and the shock of it was a lot. While she was recovered enough by morning to continue the trip, her bicycle needed repair; we found our way to the excellent city-sponsored De Fietsambassade Gent behind the train station, and while they patched up her bike, we enjoyed a tour of the nearby S.M.A.K. contemporary art museum. The later leaving time necessitated making up time, so we took the train to Waarschoot and cycled to Maldegem from there.

In both cases, going off piste was a blessing in disguise: we got a little time to recuperate, and to see bits of Antwerp and Ghent we would have missed.

The Bicycles

Our bicycles were hybrid Dutch-style touring bikes (we had to option to scale up to e-bikes, but decided we wanted to do the cycling under our own power). 

Here’s how they looked when we first encountered them in our Brussels hotel, where they’d been delivered for us:

The bikes had a single pannier on the back rack, and a handlebar bag mounted to the front: we used the pannier to carry rain gear and backup dry clothes, and the front bag to carry maps, chamois cream, phone chargers, and so on.

We provided our body heights as part of the sign-up process, so the bikes were adjusted for us. I found, perhaps because I am long-of-torso and short-of-legs, that my handlebars were too low to be comfortable; fortunately we came across a cycle repair station on the second day of cycling, and I was able to adjust them to be just right.

We took the bicycles out on the streets of Brussels the night before our formal tour started, and that was a good move: it let us get used to the position, the gearing, the saddle height, and the vibe of cycling in the city. 

For the first 30 minutes I thought “there’s no way this is ever going to feel comfortable,” but then I settled into things, and my bicycle, give or take, was a comfortable home for the next week.

Our Daily Routine

The immovable schedule points of our morning routine on the tour were the start time of the hotel breakfast (generally 7:00 a.m.), and needing to have our bags at the hotel front desk by 9:00 a.m.

We usually got on the road by 8:30 a.m., cycled for an hour, stopped for coffee and a snack, cycled for another hour, stopped for lunch, cycled for another hour, stopped for coffee, and then cycled to our destination.

The “cycling day” was about 8 hours, with 3 to 4 hours of that actually pedalling.

What It Felt Like

I had no idea what longer-distance cycling would feel like. I suspected it might be boring, but, in truth, it never was: there was always something around the next corner, and my mind settled into a meditative routine of taking in the scenery, adjusting my position in the saddle, making small gear adjustments, stopping for water, chatting with Lisa, navigating. 

It was never boring. What a surprise.

I also suspected that it would be very physically taxing, that I would end each day as though I’d just done an 8-hour workout. But cycling on a well-fitted bicycle over flat terrain with plenty of breaks turns out to be pretty easy, all things considered, and while we ended each day tired, it also felt like if someone said “there’s actually 10 km more today” we could have pulled it off. We might have complained, but we could have done it.

It wasn’t a given that Lisa and I would be compatible cyclists. We had some inkling that we were—we’d been cycling before, and had been “in training” for a month of cycling before we left—and we are, you know, in love.

But what is she wanted to go faster and I wanted to go slower? Or if one of us wanted to pack it in? Or break less often?

None of this happened: we established a good, sustainable pace, and we got through each day, sometimes cycling beside each other, sometimes with one or the other of us in front. It was smooth.

As to our physical comfort, I wrote about this in a post all its own: suffice to say that good cycle shorts and liberal use of chamois cream were important.

None of this is to say that we didn’t find waking up every morning and facing down a day of cycling daunting, especially if there was rain in the forecast  the transition was usually uncomfortable and a like nerve-wracking. Inevitably, though, 30 minutes into cycling, we’d be fully back into it.

Navigating

Our tour was self-guided, which is to say that we didn’t have a group of other cyclists with us, nor was anyone leading the way.

We were given the route in three ways: a set of daily printed route maps was waiting at our hotel when we arrived; we were given access to a mobile app with the route pre-configured; and we were emailed the GPX files of each day’s ride before we left Canada.

We ended up navigating in two ways.

To start, I imported the GPX files into Komoot, and, with my phone tucked into the waterproof sleeve of my handlebar bag, I used its turn by turn voice and map navigation to guide us. This worked, though it left me needing to always be in the lead, and “in charge” of the route.

Eventually we found our way to using the knooppunt system, which was baked into our printed route guides. The system seems complicated at first, but, once you learn it, it’s very simple: the route is described as a series of numbers, and those numbers appear on signposts along the path or road. You’re always cycling toward the next number: once you arrive at it, you switch to following the signs for the next number, and so on.

Using this system let us share the navigational load, detach from technology, and pay more attention to the road. It also kept us more connected, as we were forever shouting back and forth the route numbers “31 to 28 … 31 to 28.”

The trickiest parts of every day were cycling into the hotels, as generally this meant leaving the number system behind and reverting to phone navigation, with a lot of twists and turns. We figured it out, but not without some missteps and wrong turns.

The Weather

Paying close attention to the weather got baked into our living and breathing. We used the Buienradar mobile app regularly to track rain (as well as thunder and lightning). And of course we paid a lot of attention to the sky.

We had good advice before we left to invest in rain gear, and we followed it: we both had good raincoats and rain pants, and that let us cycle, in modest comfort, through showers. 

The weather was very changeable, and we often got in and out of our rain gear several times a day. We were lucky to only experience two real downpours, and in both cases we sheltered under trees until they passed.

We were proud of our decision to cut a day of cycling from the tour due to weather. It let us see, and set aside, our completist natures, injected some extra agency into our spirit, and the detour into Antwerp gifted us a lovely day at a museum, a lovely meal, and a visit to a top-flight art supply store. 

Highlights

Too many to mention them all. Mostly the feeling of daily accomplishment, and being together. 

But a few:

• Cycling through a neighbourhood of very fancy homes north of Brussels on our first day.
• Robot-made coffee near the Atomium.
• Pulling into our first hotel at the end of day one, in Mechelen. An amazing feeling.
• Sauna and swimming, followed by room service in our Antwerp hotel.
• Finding the Plantin Moretus Museum in Antwerp, and weather conspiring to allow us to spend a morning there.
• Taking a ferry across the river to Schellebelle.
• Deciding not to skip the loop up to Laarne, and thus getting to see the castle there.
• Stumbling upon l’Apéro d’Oc in Ghent.
• Taking our bikes on the train.
• Poppies. Everywhere.
• A man on a horse carrying a dog riding up to us while we were sheltering from the rain.
• Coffee and chocolate at Mr. Blend.
• Stumbling upon Urban Café.
• Suppers, in general, were tasty, varied, and the fuel and the delight we needed at the end of each day. 
• Reaching our hotel—and the end of the tour—in Bruges.

Because we were always moving, the tour, in my memories, plays as a series of flashes against a constantly moving background; in that sense, the real highlight is more the entire experience than any specific meal or sight.

Lowlights

• I found it hard to sleep the first 2 or 3 nights: coming down off the high of cycling, being in a strange hotel room, anxiety about the next day, all contributed.
• On the first night, and on the very last night, I had some morning charlie horses in my right calf. They passed quickly, and I was able to stretch them out, but I was afraid they’d ground us. I addressed this with oral rehydration salts and staying better hydrated through the day.
• Lisa falling off her bike in Ghent was traumatic. The shock of the fall itself, fear that she’d sprained or fractured her wrist, and, later, pain that developed—and that remains—in her shoulder. It was a lot. It could have stopped us cold. She is lucky. 

Would I Do It Again

Absolutely.

Should You Do It?

Absolutely. But with caveats.

We were newbies, but we’ve cycled in cities, we know how to navigate, and we’re generally fit. I couldn’t have done the tour as much-less-fit Peter, 10 years ago: I would have been exhausted, likely would have injured myself, and I would have been a dangerous cyclist.

Doing a longer-distance cycle tour should definitely not be your first time cycling, or your first time cycling since you were young: it’s a different thing entirely from cycling here in Charlottetown, and you need a basic level of fitness, physically and mentally.

We also benefited from 4 days of cycling, on e-bikes, in Liège before the tour started and that taught us a lot about European cycling culture: who yields to who (both according to the rules, and what the local custom is), how hand signals are used, how bells are used, and so on. That training was instumental in a smoother, safer exit from Brussels a few days later.

The Celebration Video

Although it has nothing to do with cycling, and was assembled only once we’d reached Bruges, this video that Lisa posted somehow sums up the spirit of our adventure. Such happiness. Let’s just say that to get me into that spirit, cycling 225+ km together was a necessary precondition.