Testing the Meerdael forest at the edge of Leuven

Since we had not been to the Ardennes and I spent a lot of my weekend on cleaning up, which is desastreus for my mood, we also went to  check out the nearby forest. After all we are always into the woods in the South-East of our country while greatly ignoring the fact that Leuven has one of the biggest Flemish forests, that I cross each morning on my commute to work.

The forest has a big "onthaalpoort" , welcome area in Blanden with a parking lot aligned with an embankment,   a look-out tower (which was closed), a wooden carved out trunk transformed into a falcon and behind the embankment a large area with a multi-move parcours for the children. 

As soon as we got out the children start running to climb on one of the obstacles on the embankment. There's climbing things, slides, tunnels, .... 

We went into the land behind on the trail along fields with horses, a run area for dogs and the little play area's that are part of the multi move parcours. 

It took some convincing for the boys to actually go for a stroll into the bordering woods. We kept our promise that we'd only do a small walk. I missed at the entry gate some maps and guided walks as we are used to in the Ardennes. Thee were many points marked so you can walk from crosspoint to crosspoint and design your own walk, but we had not prepared one.  But with google maps we could do a small tour. As we never left far from the entrance area we still found several games or challenges into the woods that made it quite entertaining. 

It was nice to discover although the parking lot was already relatively full for a day like this. And I'll have to remember to design a walk next time before we go.