Spring is coming!

With spring slowly on it's way, it is time to plan new adventures both big and small for the year to come. Weather is improving it seems, although the morning are still frosty :). During the past months we made only a few small recon rides while testing some new ideas on specific sections of the route. More recon riding is planned for March and April with some changes to last year's route to be explored.

Registration opened last November and we see the number of participants slowly growing. We are aiming for around 25 riders in the second edition, which is befitting a small scale event like Arden2Eifel.

Some changes that have happened and will yet happen versus the edition of last year are as follows:

1. The start location has been moved to Namur to allow for easier logistics and lodging. This makes reaching the start, both before and after the event, much easier (if you need to travel back to Namur). Trains from Trier to Namur take around 3 hours (note: not all trains take bikes and some are first come first serve).

2. The first 100 km from Namur to Eppe-Sauvage is different, which has to due with the changed start location, but also should give a bit more challenging riding in the first part. We did maintain the principle to use the first section to 'ease' into the event and not make it brutal (as some other parts later on :)).

3. Specific sections, which we received feedback on from last years participants, are under review. We try to balance the nice with the brutal in equal measure and look into improving some of these sections with some alternative paths.

4. The start day has been moved to Thursday August 14th and we stretched the cut-off time for finishing from 96 to 100 hours to allow for more daytime hours to finish on the last day.

What did not change is that the route in total remains a challenging affair. We promise it will bring you nice adventures, scenic viewpoints, touristic hotspots, hike-a-bikes and potentially some cursing. In the end if it was only easy, it would not be as rewarding.

If interested in more insights about the first edition, we would like to refer to a blog write-up by Ulrich, the first finisher of last year's Arden2Eifel, who gave a detailed recollection of his experience on MTB-news.de: LINK

Lastly, here you can find some further impressions of the first edition: LINK

We hope to see you in August!