UKC

While I'm in Brussels am looking for realistic ideas for weekend destinations up until February - most likely via cheap flights leaving Fri night, back Sunday eve or super-early Monday. So crag destinations can't be more than a couple of hours from an airport reachable from Brussels.

Flights to Malaga and Alicante look like the best bets for sport climbing. Flights to Geneva are cheap but suspect options in the valley are going to be limited to dry tooling or maybe frigid trail running until the lifts startup again.

Any other good suggestions? Good trail running/scrambling also an option.

In reply to planetmarshall:

Hey - we're based about 2hr's from Venice in the central Dolomites. You can do all sorts of stuff in the Autumn - snowy Via Ferrata, single pitch sport, multipitch sport, walking, biking, certainly south facing alpine rock on crags like Civazes or Piccolo Lagozuoi... and the mixed alpine stuff will be coming into shape reasonably soon too.

In reply to Casa Alfredino:

Sounds good - with the added benefit of being somewhere I've never been - to my shame

I'll add it to the list...

In reply to planetmarshall:
Another use case I think my site can help with!

https://www.climbcation.com is the site and you can play around with the filters(pick your climbing type and the months in which you want to go climb) as well as put in your airport to get flight prices. Move the map to europe to filter down european destinations.

This should be pretty useful in helping you find where the cheapest place to fly to is on any given weekend.

Distance from airport to crag is a feature I'm actually working on so hopefully that'll be ready in a couple weeks. Any feedback would be awesome!

UKC mods: I've posted this a couple times to the forums as I believe it is helpful. If you would like me to stop posting it let me know. I don't believe it is a competing site nor do I have plans to profit off of it, just wanna help the climbing community!

In reply to planetmarshall:

The vast majority of Ariège crags are 60-90 minutes drive from Toulouse airport, from which there are plenty of flights to Brussels but I don't know if they would give you the Fri eve / Sun eve combo. Certainly that's possible from Gatwick. Good conditions right through the winter as long as there isn't a storm brewing!

In reply to john arran:

Also remember that Schipol airport has a station in the airport with very frequent trains to/from Brussels. If s/he's close to the Gare de Midi it might not be much further timewise than going to Brussels airport

In reply to planetmarshall:
Fly to Nice, climb above Monaco at La Turbie, great hostel in Cap d'ai overlooking the sea and a gentle stroll into Monaco harbour. Not a bad weekend.

In reply to Doug:


Good call. It's logistically more awkward ( and I have to factor in the additional transport cost ) as Brussels Airport is basically between home and work which makes it a really quick getaway - but there are quite a few more options from Amsterdam.