Brigette, me, and two bikes
Trip Start
May 22, 2010
1
6
7
Trip End
Jun 28, 2010
Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands
Friday, June 18, 2010
It's been soooo long since Brigette and I have taken a trip together, what a perfect way to wrap up my transition from CA to MN. She needed a greenery/outdoor break from Dakar, so what better place than the canals of Holland?
We met up in Amsterdam and had two days of canal wandering and garden visiting and herring eating. I love that town. so pretty around every corner, I could just stroll and stroll and stroll. It was kind of freezing and cloudy/rainy, but we perservered, loading our bags with funny felt slippers and blue and white tulip vases.
We took the train to Utrecht to meet up with our bikes. Tulip Cycling set us up with two great bikes and a gps on one with a preprogrammed route for four days. They took our bags and delivered them to each hotel as we went along...perfect! The first day was trickier, getting to learn how to follow that pink line on the gps, especially through town with a lot of bikers all around you...it was hard to know which way to look when every other bike was going so fast. But once we got out of town and we were the only ones around, it was a piece of cake. We past kilometers of canals, farms, villages, and we slowly learned to stop in town at the bakery to get a hot out of the oven apple turnover....SO GOOD!
I guess since I have waited so long to write this alot of the details are lost, but basically we rode about 40K a day, which was pretty easy and left us lots of time for bakery stopping and windmill viviewing. We stayed the night in Schoonhoven, Dordrecht, Gorinchem, and then Utrecht. There were ferry crossings and cheesemakers and lots of windmills and cows and people alot older than us on the bike trails. We were sort of worried about that....have we already slid into geriatric travel? We didn't care, it was all perfect and fun. In the evening we had time to go relax with a glass of wine/beer and bitterbal (fried bar snack, in every bar) and watch the World Cup. We only got lost one afternoon when the gps decided not to work and kept riding in and out of a town and along the freeway til finally we got on the right track. We had lots of questions about Holland, or should I say the Netherlands as we rode along...like why that car is perched up on the back of every barge (it's the captain's) why orange everywhere when it isn't the flag color (the queen is from the house of orange), why are there empty backpacks hanging on people's flagpoles?(a student has passed a test), and why bitterbal in EVERY bar?
We ended our trip in Paris, just a quick train ride from from Utrecht....and much to our surprise, we became very laconic and felt like we were really boring! All we wanted to do was just sit in the Tuileries and read our books and eat baguettes and cheese.....and I suppose there is nothing wrong with that, in fact that is really what you should be doing in Paris on the weekend, but somehow we felt we weren't appreciating it enough.
So, it was a great week, great to see Brigette....a fun mellow adventure, and I fell in love with Holland and realized I need to wait a long time before I go back to Paris again.
