Levensloop

We hadn't honestly paid much attention to the Levensloop announcements before hand, neither to the build up of the event village in the park around the corner. 

But the water disaster in the morning had caused us not to go to the East of Belgium, neither had we thought of or found time to do grocery shopping.  So when we got hungry in the evening, we remembered the enthousiast drums we had heard in the afternoon and figured we could see and check out the food stands at Levensloop. 

We took a seat and got some food and explored the event and the atmosphere. There was a nice bit of people out but not quite a crowd at all.  There was music on stage and the boys amused themselves to ride the stationary bikes for a while. 

We left for the threatening clouds of a new storm approaching that also forced some security measures in the village. We didn't want to ride it out there but returned home to also observe the roof's performance under the new storm. In the end we hardly got any rain from those dark clouds, which was good for the event of Levensloop! 

We had noticed that the service clubs of Leuven, among other Rotary, had a team running at Levensloop too. That inspired Jan to sign up last minute to go and run one or two lapses for the good cause of cancer research together with Kabouter on Sunday morning. 
So on Sunday morning we returned and Beertje and I cheered for our 2 man running for the cause.  Unlike the evening before when I had not really explored the trails around the abbey, I now noticed the constant flow of people walking or running in small groups and I really got the vibe of this community gathering and rallying for 24h in teams for the fight against cancer; 

We hang out a bit more in the village as a nice escape of the big clean-up at home.  At noon it actually became quite busy with a really good vibe. 

By now I felt involved enough to return one more time for the closing ceremony. All teams did a walk of fame around the village (well for those that were still around, some teams looked quite incomplete which makes sense after 24h commitment). 
The whole event raised a beautiful amount of 148000 euro. And we noted next year's date in our agenda with Jan committing to run once more for the service clubs and Kabouter wanting to run for his school's team which he discovered there.