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…