The White Mousis move with the times. Activities and events are evolving. What was possible yesterday is not always possible today, and vice versa.
Among our past adventures, the 36-hour round is undoubtedly the most beautiful and the craziest…
The idea was great because it was simple!
Travel as many kilometers as possible by your own means, without money, leaving Stavelot on Saturday at 8am and returning on Sunday at 8pm.
A test from another time, in a distant era, without internet or mobile phone!
One point earned per kilometer traveled, one penalty point per franc spent, the stamps of the cities visited were used as control points to calculate the kilometers traveled.
A visit to a foreign country earns bonus points… Simple and difficult at the same time.
From a few hundred km at the beginning, the records have been beaten year after year to exceed 2,000km (more than 60km/h average).
In duet, sometimes individually, our “rounders” visited many countries: France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Italy … and Monaco!
All means of transportation, or almost all, were used except the airplane, even if a team was close to flying to Morocco with a battalion of French para-commandos. We still wonder what finally kept them from taking that plane…
We have known prestigious rounds, others unlucky, but all have been surprising and picturesque…
“There are as many stories as there are rounds. The one where a team stopped at the festival of a neighboring village without going any further, while making the race headquarters in Stavelot believe that they were traveling through the heart of France… to finally return to Stavelot in 15 minutes!
The one that saw a team achieve a great first: the train-stop on the Nancy-Paris line.
The one that saw a team return a few days later after turning their round into an extended weekend.”
The round, it was also a permanence of race remained on the line of departure to live the adventures at distance, to control, calculate, prognosticate and to make vibrate a whole city the time of a weekend…
This exceptional adventure began in the 1950s and ended in the mid-1980s. The ever-increasing traffic had made the adventure more dangerous and complicated.
The round was an exceptional opportunity for those who lived it and remains today a myth for the new generations who did not know it.