A very snowy adventure - No. 205

Today, we had a long adventure. We went on and on about things and the adventure seemed to stretch on for ever. Not in a bad way of course.

We decided to go early in the morning before the snow melted. It was a good idea and we had a mix of snow and grass. It looked perfect for an adventure. If only Sue could have come with us on this adventure. It would have been even better than the last.

We started walking next to the fields of snow. It was such a difference from last week when there was no snow at all. Maybe a bit of ice but that was it. I managed to take a very lucky picture. I took a picture of Tonio walking and the view to his left. He turned to see what I was doing and I took the picture while he was turning. It ended up looking like he is looking at the view to his left. What a lucky picture.

We saw what looked like a chocolate cake with icing. The icing was actually icing (snow) and the chocolate was soil. That is the third time soil looked like chocolate on our adventures but this time it looked the most like chocolate.

Tonio asked me what frogs do in the winter. As they are cold blooded they freeze too, right? I answered by saying that certain types of frog do just that then continue their lives once the ice melts and there are others that find shelter in deep lakes where it’s less cold than the surface.

Towards the end I wanted to do an angel on the snow (a "snow angel") and this was the result:

And finally, we went back to the car and drove off. Did you enjoy it? If you have then make sure to join us on our next adventure. Also make sure to check out Tonio's blog called The Wanderer. But for now, goodbye!

GianlucaDeGringu 

[by Tonio:]

It snowed quite a bit on Friday and the following morning we woke up to a Belgium covered in white. The forecast was that the temperature would go up to well over zero during the day, so I suggested we go for this weekend's adventure on a Saturday morning, before all the snow melted.

What a show!

We parked next to no. 205, from where we had walked last time. Today's was, yet again, a continuation of the eastward progression, starting from the edge of Overijse into Huldenberg, Loonbeek and now Neerijse. This is almost all agricultural landscape: fields and farms. The last few weeks it was cold with sun and cloud creating a spectacle of their own. Today, the same terrain looked so much different covered with snow.

Different animals used different modes of locomotion along this passage

We appreciated, in particular, the "croaky" sound as we trudged on the fresh snow. We enjoyed observing marks made by previous walkers - human and animal. The arrow shaped prints made by pheasants, round shaped marks probably of a dog's paws, and of course human footprints, or rather shoe prints. At one point, trying to step on these same prints myself, I was puzzled at the long steps the previous walker had taken. Then it clicked, and as a (previous) runner I should be ashamed for not having realised this at once: they were the prints of a jogger.

Our first encounter with animals today was with horses. The poor chaps were too cold to take any interest whatever in us. They stood or lay on the ground motionless to conserve energy. Luckily for them, it would later warm up substantially. We also saw pheasants, a farm dog which wanted to play with Gianluca while he was trying to tie his shoelaces... and a silly man with a child's brain driving around in the country lanes with his 4x4 jeep or whatever. Gianluca recognised the same driver from a couple of weeks back driving a sort of rally car in the mud on that occasion. Mercifully, we encountered Mr Child Brain only once, although I suspect the tyre tracks we saw throughout our otherwise wonderful walk had been left there by him.

One animal that we didn't see, but which we discussed, was frogs. This was the result of my remarking on the croaky sound underfoot. I then wondered what happens to frogs when it freezes. Being cold blooded animals, I reasoned that frogs should naturally and quite literally freeze too. Gianluca then mentioned a species of frog that freezes itself in autumn to thaw back to life in spring. But I wondered about other species of frogs. I'll need to do research on this.

An old war bunker transformed into a winter shelter for bats

An hour and a half after the start of our walk, we came back to the car to notice that the landscape was indeed thawing out. We had come just at the right moment to experience the Belgian winter countryside at its most beautiful.

A 'special' adventure with Sue - no. 204 at Loonbeek

As you have seen in the title, there is something special about this adventure. Today, we have brought with us Sue, my mother. She hadn’t been outside for a while and it was a nice day so we decided to go for an adventure together.

We started off on a path that quickly went off the beaten path. Ice littered all of the nooks and crannies everywhere. Many times I couldn’t resist picking up a pebble and throwing it at the ice.

The view varied a number of times from dry soil everywhere around to a farmhouse. The good thing for Sue was that she chose the perfect time to join us. This was one of the nicer adventures. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the warmest. The wind seemed to always be against us and it only seemed to get colder as we continued. Luckily, Tonio prepared some hand warmers for us. These hand warmers go on for about 8 hours so even a few hours after the adventure I was using it to warm our hands.

And finally, we went back to the car and drove home...

Did you enjoy our adventure? If you have then make sure to join us on our next adventure in Adventures In Dijleland. Also, check out Tonio's blog called The Wanderer. But for now,
goodbye!

GianlucaDeGringu

[by Tonio]:

We had a special guest with us today: Sue. For her, we reserved one of the most beautiful walks since a long time. It was sunny - our third successive adventure with sun shining into our faces during the second half of the walk. Not bad for winter in Belgium.



But it was also freezing, and this created an interesting effect on the ground. In the previous two weeks, the sky stole the show with an interesting interplay between sunlight and constantly changing cloud formations. Today, with no clouds at all and a brilliant blue sky, our attention turned to the ground.

We saw icy puddles, many of which Gianluca tested for solidity by hurling stones at them...

... martian landscapes:

... and strange icy shapes. Curiously, in some cases where puddles had frozen over the surface formed like a glass sheet with a void underneath. Pity that, a few seconds after this picture was taken the heart shaped loop was no more, having been shattered by you-know-who. With the forecast temperatures, it had every chance of remaining intact for a whole week. Oh, well.

Interesting and photogenic as our outing was today, we were glad to go back inside the heated interior of the car and back home for a warm coffee.

Back to the Moses stick: it's the quality that counts!

Today, the unusual thing about this adventure was that there really isn’t much to talk about. This adventure will probably be posted just after number 200: we didn't have time to post because we were on holiday in Bulgaria.

We started walking at about 3:00 in the afternoon. We are now walking in afternoons instead of mornings. The reason for that is we wanted to change things up a bit. In its ways the sun is much nicer because of the orange afternoon glow as it shines on the fields. Personally I prefer it.

Towards the middle of the adventure I went back to my old ways. I found a perfect stick and used it for support. I call it the Moses stick because in many stories with image he had a stick while leading the Israelites out of Egypt. A few minutes later we passed a corner and there were about five dogs that passed us. Tonio isn’t the biggest fan of dogs so he wasn’t too happy. Those were the animals of the day.

Even though I don’t have much to write, the view wasn’t any less beautiful. It reminded me of the day of the amazing drive in Iceland with the sun a similar colour as it gleamed on the mountains to our left.

Finally, we went back to our car and drove home. Did you have fun? If you did then make sure to join us on our next adventure. Also, be sure to check out Tonio's blog called The Wanderer. Hope to see you in the next adventure in Adventures In Dijleland!

GianlucaDeGringu

[By Tonio]:

Today's walk was very much a continuation of last week's, without the spectacular clouds. Or any farm animals. I did manage, however, to take a few interesting pictures. Nothing much happened. In fact, we considered this to be one of the least eventful of our adventures. We just walked, chatted and enjoyed the scenery.







We discussed whether it's possible to have a situation where quantity would be more important than quality. You could say that today's pictures are an illustration of the rule, i.e. that it's the quality that counts.

A 'flatty' adventure

Today, was a mix of many adventures that we’ve had before, some so old that they aren’t even in the blog!

The points stop abruptly at 125 and the next point is at 200, so the adventure started there.

If we hadn’t worn our walking shoes this adventure would be a struggle. About half of the adventure was us navigating the marsh-like path even though our surroundings looked nothing like a marsh.

A shadow selfie: in Maltese you could say it's a dellfi...

At the beginning of the adventure, there was a steep uphill. While we were going up Tonio predicted that this adventure would be "very hilly". He couldn’t have been more wrong. For the rest of the adventure the ground was as flat as a pancake.

A lot like adventure 516 (the first adventure in the mix) the clouds contrasted the flat terrain which made nice pictures. The clouds were so nice that they deserved a few pictures by themselves.

A field of soil looked like rich dark chocolate. It looked so good that I was tempted to reach out my hand, get some soil and taste it, even though I knew that it was just going to taste like soil. It reminded me of a very old adventure we had where we saw a field that had also looked like chocolate. But the chocolate in that adventure was much neater and looked more like chocolate powder as the grains were much smaller and lighter.

As we turned to the right there was a change of scenery. We passed through what looked like a tunnel of trees (ahem adventure 516 ahem) and the fields turned into the simplest green grass. This reminded me of a saying ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’. Although we didn't mention it in our blog posts, in almost every adventure we complain that if we went the other direction it would have been nicer. I said to Tonio that if we both went in opposite directions we would both say that the other direction was nicer. This brought me to another thought. One reason we humans are still sane and not extinct is because we always want better than what we have. So greed in a way is actually a gift because without greed I don’t think we would still be alive. We wouldn’t have evolved as humans and we would have stayed in our barbaric ways.

We proved the fact that the grass was always greener on the other side literally. We saw three donkeys eating grass (we also saw donkeys a few adventures ago). They ignored us at first but after about 30 seconds a donkey started walking towards us. We took some grass and fed it to the donkey even though he had a whole field of grass to eat from. We fed him some more grass and another donkey came towards us. We fed it some grass and suddenly he brayed for ten seconds straight. It must have meant 'thank goodness' in donkey language. I thought he was thinking ‘thank goodness I finally managed to eat some grass from the other side that is clearly greener’ but it was in fact ‘thank goodness she has come’. The 'she' was the owner of the donkeys with dinner. No wonder they were eating so much grass. They had come to us thinking that the grass was greener and tastier on the

other side even though they had a whole field of grass surrounding them. The saying is correct. The grass is always greener on the other side.

And finally, we went to the car and drove home. Did you enjoy our adventure? If you did then make sure you join us on our next adventure. Also, if you haven’t already, make sure to check out Tonio's blog called The Wanderer. But for now, that’s all folks! See you on our next adventure in Adventures In Dijleland!

GianlucaDeGringu

[by Tonio]:

Into the 200s and back to the origin of this blog, close to Huldenberg and the place where we had the idea to start chronicling our adventures in Dijleland. I started off the day with my famous last words: "I think today's adventure will be hilly". Indeed, the first path was rather steep, but it turned out by the middle of our walk that today's adventure was actually... flatty.



It was also a bit of an interesting mix of our "post-sciatica operation" walks, minus the forest. For example, the sky rewarded us with an interesting and sometimes spectacular mix of cloud formations and play of light...







... and we finished off our adventure yet again with a close encounter with farm animals. After talking to cows, horses and rams on previous occasions, today it was the turn of two donkeys. Again, it took quite some persuasion to establish trust, but when the ice was broken, we had them literally eating out of our hands.

Horses, rams and future projects (Adventure no. 122)

Today, instead of looking at the beauty of the fields, we decided to talk about our plans in the future.

(Spoiler alert. If you want a surprise, skip this paragraph.) We talked about going to Edinburgh. From what Tonio said, we would travel a lot like we did in Iceland. We would spend a day in Edinburgh and then go towards the north - as Tonio likes to say, off the beaten track. We also talked about possible future things to do once we finish the Dijleland map. We thought about exploring all 19 communes of Brussels. Maybe, because I will be older, I might be able to plan those adventures myself. Exciting times ahead!

We were in deep conversation throughout the adventure but we were interrupted quite a few times. Obviously, Tonio was taking pictures of the scenery which we should have looked at more because it was very nice. We were also interrupted by a horse, who was really kind to us. We said hello to him, Tonio took a few pictures and he even managed to stroke the horse a few times before the horse got nervous and shook his head. We politely said goodbye and walked in to see another horse. This one however was in the middle of lunch and you know how animals are in the middle of eating. He didn’t even look up. We left him to do his business (which was also polite of us) and continued on.

Towards the end we met two rams who, at first, weren’t interested and walked away. We then tried to make ram noises (good thing no one was around. We would have looked like fools!) The rams looked up at us and started slowly walking towards us. They walked faster and faster until they were almost running towards us. They stopped, with temporary fascination for about 30 seconds. But we must have been boring humans because they walked away after a minute. Tonio called them ‘bdabad’ which is Maltese for rams but also figuratively used as savages. I can see why rams in Maltese is figurative for savages.

And, after the long walk, we returned to our car and drove home... Did you enjoy our discussion/adventure? If you have then make sure that you join us on the next one in Adventures In Dijleland!

GianlucaDeGringu

Ps. Check out Tonio’s blog called The Wanderer. He posts on holiday adventures with me and my family or just by himself. Goodbye!

[by Tonio]:

We had a pleasant, easy stroll today, mostly through country lanes in between crop fields at Vaalbeek, close to the Meerdaalwoud forest, our last venture to this rather distant section of the Zuid Dijleland hiking network.

We befriended, first, a horse and towards the end of our walk two rams (I think they're rams). The latter acted rather aloof in the beginning, turning their backs to us and walking to the other side of the field when we came next to them and said hello. We felt rather offended, but then we thought of talking to them in their own language, making animal sounds. It worked wonders! Each time they looked up from their grazing, and when we kept calling out to them they decided to move over to our side. It was heart warming to see both rams purposefully crossing the entire length of the field to join us.



Most of the time today we discussed future projects and adventures, including an upcoming trip to Scotland, possibly exploring the different communes of Brussels once we cover all the numbers in our map of Zuid Dijleland, and also about activities for Gianluca at home. We were so engrossed in conversation that we hardly saw the time and the kilometres go by.



At the very end, Gianluca insisted on walking all the way back to no. 118 so that we would have "closed the loop" properly, instead of turning left after the last corner to reach the car. Pointless, in my opinion, but never mind. It was yet another thoroughly enjoyable two hours out in the Belgian countryside.

[P.S. The "closing the loop" thing is a bit my fault from a past adventure, when I insisted on walking towards a wooden number post as otherwise our adventure "wouldn't count".]

Hot turnip soup (Adventure no. 118)

After our holiday break, we have returned to our weekly adventures. Today, because of the cold weather and the freezing cold we decided to make it a short adventure.

We started off by walking by my favourite type of adventure between two active farms. We saw some type of vegetable on the floor and Tonio thought that they were turnips. The field became clear that it was growing the “turnips” because of the mountain of them we saw a few seconds later.

We still got to go to the same forest we've been going to for the past few adventures. We managed to remember one of our paths that we had been in two or three adventures ago. It was the same adventure as when we had seen the military base.

We walked out of the forest into more farms. When we found number 119 we had to walk to one of the few starting points for newcomers . It was a strange path made of grass and two edges. It curved around one of the farms and into a parking lot where the starting point was. Then we had to do a bit of off-roading (more like on-roading if you ask me) and we went to a cosy café which was all about cycling. We both bought a soup that could have been turnip soup...

After some more on-roading I saw the car and, as always, sprinted to it. We went in the car and drove home... Did you enjoy our winter adventure? If you have then make sure to join us in our next one in Adventures In Dijleland!

GianlucaDeGringu

P.S. Make sure to check out Tonio's blog called The Wanderer.  He writes about his journeys to different countries. Hope you enjoy!

[by Tonio]: It didn't take us long this 2018 to go on our first 'adventure'. Being at the peak of winter, and myself still recovering from a flu and an ever shaky backbone, we kept it short and sweet. It makes sense not to stay out too long in the cold because it would take away most of the enjoyment.

Our not-too-long walk started at 118 at the edge of Vaalbeek, next to a quaint roadside shrine.



We turned into a country road that leads into farmland. It was mostly farmland today, and the exact weather and ambience to experience the bleakness of winter in Belgium.

Gianluca considered this plain too flat to give a good picture, but I thought I could prove otherwise.

Contrary to many, I find the desolation and miserable appearance of this season to be rich in character. When Gianluca asked what I meant by this I found it difficult to explain. All I could say was that the pictures I was taking might hopefully serve to express what I meant.

Shortly before we reentered the car, we stopped at an empty Flemish pub - empty except for the owner who was watching a TV transmission of a mountainbike race being held in nearby Heverlee - for a much needed mug of hot soup.