BELGIUM

With that dawn began the hectic week of two Americans who, in addition to seeing the Olympic sports, were trying to catch up with Paris after several years' absence.

But Paris will not tire first at that game. One day, as we sat down, exhausted, on our trunks in a storage ware- house, something suspended by ropes from the ceiling inspired us simultaneously with the same idea. The thing was the 16-foot canoe in which we had crossed Brittany in 1922, and the idea ran, "Let's drop out of this rush and roar. Back to the Back Doors Country!"

Verily, once you have tasted the de- lights of back-doors travel, the luxurious welcome along established tourist routes will serve only to wake in you a home- sickness for that vagabond realm where footpaths and canals take the place of railways and rivers, where Europe's omnipresent "Hotel Splendide" dwindles into "The Fisherman's Inn," and where your information is gleaned, not through smartly uniformed guides, but through bargees, haystack sleepers, and wandering artists.

For of such is the Back Doors Country.

Belgium having been decided upon, we played luck against ignorance in the matter of a starting point by drawing lots, the slip drawn exhibiting the word "Bruges." Within 48 hours we were en route for Flanders, with our canoe, the Nageoma, a day ahead of us on the grande vitesse.

Along the Paris-to-Bruges line no customhouse is needed to inform you that you have crossed the border. Though war's lightnings still revealed their passage amid Nature's cemeteries of blasted tree-trunks, underfoot lay the Low Countries' infinitude of green flatness, where flying miles of sugar beetroot, plotted as neatly as squares in a crossword puzzle. spelled intensive cultivation in seven letters-Belgium…"