Saturday 1 February 2014
| Distance (km) | 23 kms | |||
| Distance (time) | 5 hrs | |||
| Hard / Soft surface | 20% / 80% | |||
| Landscape |
|
|||
| Weather |
 8° 4 Bft
|
|||
|
|
||||
|
Finally we have time and a weekend with good weather. That is, the night from Friday to Saturday it will rain but during Saturday morning it is supposed to clear up and who knows we'll get some sun in the afternoon. So we leave just before 8 in the morning from home to Zichem where we park the car at the railway station. It has been bucketing rain the whole way but since it will still take a while before we can start walking we're not too worried. At Zichem we take the train to Aarschot and from there the train to Heist-op-den-Berg. After a 20 minutes wait we take the bus to Westerlo so that, finally, at 11:35 we're back at bus stop Beeltjensdreef and can start walking. Quite a change, because when we ended here last June it was sunny, dusty and with green trees. Now it's wet, muddy and leafless trees. But it stopped raining and that it the most important.
We walk a short piece through the forest towards the river Grote Nete that we have to follow for a while. It more feels like walking though a park, also because the track along the Grote Nete is just a narrow tarmac road. We pass the good looking castle De Merode and enter the forest again. It's still a gravel road and that has the big advantage that it's not muddy in spite of all the rain of last night. Just before Blauberg we have a short lunch break. It's not very warm though the sun is doing it's very best to get through the clouds. So we don't stay long though the bench is quite comfortable. Passing Blauberg we pass some farmland but soon enough we go into the forest again with an occassional piece of moors all the way until Averbode. The tracks are really very muddy here and so it's more slipping and sliding than walking. It is here that we encounter our first "hill". Not much more than a bump but it is the beginning of the end of the flat pancake landschape that we had since we left Hoek van Holland. In Averbode we admire the large abbey. It\s very quiet but considering the very large (now empty) parking areas it must be pretty touristic here. A short piece of tarmac leads us out of Averbode for the final section of today. Close to the railway station of Terstel we cross the railroad that we passed this morning by train. Then still fresh and fruity but by now the mud wrestling is getting the best of us and we have painful ankles and feet. The last piece of until Zichem is along the Demer river, fortunately a gravel path hence not muddy. A very shy ray of sunlight passes through the clouds - a bit late, though. In Zichem where the main street crosses the Demer we turn left for the last 200m towards the car. High time to find our hotel in Diest. That is easier said than done as it's all one-direction roads in the historic town centre and the few streets that aren't have been opened up for reasons only road workers probably know. But we get there and we're at crawling distance from the historic market with plenty of restaurant for a culinary treat. |
  |
|||
|
|
||||
Download track WesZic.gpx