Information

The Entre Lesse et Lomme in the Ardenne is 78 kilometers long and is foreseen to be done in three days.

This time I bought some socks for walking, a way to organize my equipment (the ‘system’ exists out of 5 bags: Trash, Food, Clothing Clean, Clothing Dirty and General), which made it much easier to quickly grab the things I needed, lastly I bought 2 drysacks to keep my stuff dry and not moisty.
I used one drysack for my sleeping bag, bivi and pillow and the other one for my clothing and powerbank.

The Hike

Arrival/Day 1

We arrived around 10:30 in Lesse, which has parkingspace for 6 cars.

Since we arrived late and had to do 25km we ate a quick meal at the start near the river and went our way.
It was a flat parcours so we covered good distance, at around 17h we found out it was hunting seasons already but ignored the warnings and continued our journey.

Off course, we did encounter hunters but they let us pas and didn’t say a thing, but it wasn’t my most comfort feeling.
We came at a location where they used to melt steel, it had a roof and a terras… Since the hunt was nearby this didn’t seem like a bad spot so we set-up the tarp.
I never saw Kim fall asleep so fast, neither I heard him snore like that night.

Day 2

We woke up around 8am in the cold and decided to pack our gear and start walking to get a little warm.
We saw a sunny spot after few kilometers so we ate or meal with the sun on our faces. When departing Kim had a bit of bother in his hip, it would get to him later on…

A kilometer further we saw an amazing place to sleep, it was called ‘Grand Camp’ and was way better then our previous sleeping location.
It had a big roof and a place where you could light a fire and a little cabin if needed. It did not have a trash bin.

We hiked along in the woods at a nice tempo, so we could get to the seconds ‘Grand Camp’.
Halfway our journey we saw a boar and its offspring, in doubt what to to, we moved on until the little one saw us and barked, the boars went into the bunches near the road.
I walking on with a heartbeat of about 200 since the road was so small and the bushes moved quite a bit and I was afraid it mama-bear would bash my leg protecting it’s offspring, none of that happend and we continued with no harm done!

Kim’s injury got worse and above that we missed a turn so we had to walk an extra km…
We hiked and hiked to find the camp, but there was none to be found, meanwhile Kim looked like an old fellah limping.

We set up the tarp in the woods and slept really comfy.

Day 3

In the morning it was certain, Kim couldn’t walk the rest of the way, he went to the village to take the bus and was fine with me hiking the rest of the track.
So, on a good tempo I finished the hike solo to meet Kim again at the starting point.

It seemed there were no buses were riding on Saturday and Kim had to take a taxi which was a big rip-off!

Final Worlds

Another value lesson was learned, when it’s time to stop, you stop and call it a day.

A word of advice

• Hunting season is from 21/9 till 31/12 and the parcours is closed…
• …the hunting season already started on 1/9 for boars
• Not many trashcans, only at the beginning/end and the second half of the second day
• There is no second camp, the ‘Grand Camp’ is the first and only one
• In the first half of the third section the route marking is not the best and it wise to load a GPX on your phone/gps