It was such a lovely Saturday yesterday. When you wake up in the morning with a sunshine like that, with, oh so springy feeling and too much espresso, you want to get out and hiking. Or at least so do Waffle and I.
We have been struggling with getting the activity levels up again, but yesterday it was rather difficult to find any excuses to stick to the sofa. So we searched for a nice hike, not so far away and headed towards Hotton, in Walloon. That would take us about 15 kilometers through Belgian countryside.
Hotton is such a lovely, and very Wallonian village somewhere on the eastern edge of Ardennes. Our trail took off at the center of the village and quickly took us into the fields and forests. The area seems to be densely populated by badgers. So much so, that farmers diligently fence off their fields. The badger trails are constantly crossing streams and roads. We passed some dead badgers too. Such a sad sight.
Our 15 kilometers quickly grew longer, by accidental wrong turn. We had to trust in Google maps for a moment. Guiding your way through trails only relying on small piece of map and description can be difficult. I recommend descent maps (Note to self)! A small detour and map reading later we found back on the right course and found the next very cute village. So cute and small that people don’t seem to even lock their doors, since the most dangerous intruder is the badger or neighbor borrowing sugar. Or what ever french people borrow from each other.
We kept a hard eye on the guide book and managed to stay on the trail. Exiting the village brought us to a plain of fields high up on top of a hill. There we saw a black line of birds appearing in the horizon. There we cranes! Wedge after another of them, must have been over thousand birds in total, making their way up into north, towards Scandinavia and Russia. Maybe among them there was the couple that stays close by my childhood home. Oh the nostalgia.
We still had quite some kilometers to go, both of us getting a little it tired and the air cooling down as the sun was drooping lower and lower. We passed still another village, spotted some deer and oddly behaving bulls on a field and were thoroughly chilled and tired when we arrived back at the car. But they day had been very beautiful again, nature pampered us a little, and I find myself again to be very fond of the southern half of Belgium!
Today we still crawled onto a trail. To the coastal side, near Knokke, here in Belgium. Our legs were already sore and the hike felt extremely long. We probably managed to pick the most boring trail there was! Nothing more to mention about that.
On Travels Love and Life 