Dendermonde sits where the Dender gives up and pours itself into the Scheldt, and the old town hall on the Grote Markt is the thing you aim for when you roll in. Its belfry is one of the Flemish and Walloon towers grouped together by UNESCO as the Belfries of Belgium and France, and the reason those towers matter is simple: in the medieval Low Countries a belfry was the civic answer to the church spire. It held the town charters, the bell that called the citizens, and the watchman who looked out for fire and for armies. Dendermonde needed the watchman more than most, because a town at a river junction is a town everybody wants, and it was besieged, burned and rebuilt more than once, most brutally in 1914 when German troops set much of it alight.
The riding around here is Flanders in its purest form. Flat, yes, but not boring if you choose the dike roads along the Scheldt, where the river swings in long tidal loops and the wind comes off the polders with nothing to stop it. Expect brick villages, poplar rows, cyclists in tight packs on Sunday mornings and the occasional stretch of cobbles that will rattle your mirrors loose. Lebbeke and Zele are a few kilometres off, and Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels all lie within an easy hour, which is exactly why traffic thickens at commuter times. Mid-morning and early evening light on the river is the best of it.
The town has a story it tells every ten years or so: the Ros Beiaard, a giant horse carried through the streets with the four Aymon brothers on its back, a legend from the Charlemagne cycle that Dendermonde treats as its own. If you are not lucky enough to hit the procession, the béguinage a short walk away gives you a quiet courtyard of whitewashed houses and a sense of how lay religious women lived here for centuries.
Practically, this is a stop that gives you everything. Dendermonde is a town of over forty thousand, so fuel, cafés and bakeries are never far, and the market square has terraces where you can park the bike within sight. Order a local beer if you are done for the day, or a strong coffee and a waffle if you are not, and watch the bell tower count the quarters while the square goes about its business.