We went 30+ miles from home to fern ridge reservoir and back in 94 degree heat. It was wonderful, yet tiring.
Peter, Tracy, and Pepe in front of the east side of the Cascades
This past weekend – April 12th and 13th – we were in Bend, OR. On April 13th we went on a great 42 mile ride around Bend, which is essentially an amalgamation of Routes 7 and 8 of the Deschutes County Bike Guide.
We had a great time riding around in the perfect weather. Pictures can be found in a photoset on flickr.
On September 26, on one of the last beautiful days before the rain began to sock us in, Peter and I went for a wonderful ride up into the hills south of Eugene, through Creswell, on through Lorane, where we had lunch at the deli that used to be the general store. On our way home we stopped by Bike Friday and got a replacement for the part that caused us so much trouble on our Zuiderzeeroute ride, and figured out a few other problems we’ve been having with Pepé, which was great, not unlike the rest of the ride.
Here’s a map of where we rode.
Last Sunday afternoon (August 19) I was running some errands at 29th and Willamette, and realized I really wanted to zoom past both Market of Choice and the bank and ride my bike up into the hills for a while instead. On Tuesday, August 21, I got that wish. We rode Lorane-Fox Hollow (map here) and it was very pretty:
and I was very happy:
There was a big bad climb followed by a beautiful valley and a breathtaking descent (here’s Peter doing his best to brake and hold Pepé steady while I snap a picture of that last):
Also we stopped at an all-you-can-eat blackberry bramble, and that was pretty excellent, too. Whee!
We just finished a great ride. We went counter clockwise around this map. That’s south over Dillard Rd, then up to Mt Pisgah, then up to Glenwood, and then home.
Just as we were cresting Dillard, the valley opened up before us.
It was a wonderful ride and a great day for it too! Now, on to blackberry milkshakes!
Crime and Punishment? Love story.
The Crying Game? Also a love story.
Wait, no, I’m quoting Hamell on Trial when I meant to be writing about our last day of cycling on this particular expedition to the Netherlands.
After our triumphant return to Oud Ade after eight fantastic days on the Zuiderzeeroute, we ate a delicious dinner with my grandparents and showed off our pictures and called my parents to tell them we’d found the most delightful little bed and breakfast for the rest of our trip. Then we went to bed and slept really soundly.
The next morning (Saturday June 30), we awoke and rejoiced at having neither a scheduled breakfast nor a mandatory “pack it up and get out of here” time. Instead, we ate at our own pace, then unpacked and sorted through the resultant piles of stuff. For the rest of the day, Peter gave Pepé a much-needed very thorough washing, the kind that involves taking the bike apart to get at the really grody bits (cough, cough… the chain… cough, cough), while I did a truly epic amount of laundry. Both projects would’ve been worthy of before and after pictures, except that the “before” stages were so gross we’re happy to let those memories fade without extensive documentation. We showed Opa the tiny little trailer hitch part that caused us so much trouble (for want of a nail and all that), and he admitted to having worried that the trailer would be a problem, and dismissed the broken weld as “speelgoed” — a toy.
On Sunday, 1 July, my parents arrived from distant lands, bearing spices (no, really — Costco-sized bulk quantities of black pepper are a much-appreciated gift) and a new spare tire for Pepé! Hurray! (My dad spent some time on the phone with the ever-helpful guys at Bike Friday before eventually finding a suitably high-pressure tire at a bike store in Linden, NJ — thus saving some anxious waiting and FedEx money.) Of course, they got the full slideshow experience, too. That night, we went to my cousin Stéphanie’s graduation party.
Enough, you are saying, when did you go biking again? Okay, skip forward a day to Tuesday, July 3 (and I feel I should mention that none of the preceding days have been dry ones, although the weather cleared delightfully for the afternoon of Stéph’s shindig). The plan: go for a shortened version of one of the rides in our bike routes around Leiderdorp book, the Kagerplassenroute, which circumnavigates (albeit somewhat broadly) the Kaag, a lake quite central to the van der Gaag family’s experiences in the Oud Ade area. (Oma and Opa vacationed at a houseboat, the Hou ‘e Zo, on a nearby lake, het Vennemeer, for years before retiring to Oud Ade: some of my very earliest memories of visiting them in Holland involve summers spent on “de boot,” which in many ways served the function of a cabin in the woods, only with lots more playing on the lake.) The plan was to finish the loop during the morning by taking a ferry across the Kaag back to Oud Ade, where we would join my parents and grandparents for a boat ride in the same area that afternoon. I was excited to see the Oud Ade-Warmond-Kaag area from land for a change, and Peter was excited to go for another bike ride, and both of us were looking forward to an afternoon of boating.
So. As we had for many days of our big trip, we woke up early that Tuesday morning and ate a big hearty breakfast and disregarded the weather outside (the trend all week was rainy mornings and possible clearing up during the late afternoon). Soon we saddled up and rode off in the general direction of Leiden. As we turned to cross a polder towards Warmond, we noticed a large group of cyclists headed that way from the other direction. Turns out our route for the day overlapped somewhat with that of the Laura — the national fietsvierdaagse: four-day biking event (there are also four-day walking events, and most of them are regionally based, but the Laura is nationwide with different routes of equivalent length for different regions). So that was sort of crazy for a few kilometers there — so many people, and no fewer than two cafés set up as official Laura break points, including one where participants could collect stamps to prove they’d gone the day’s distance (it also had a very tempting sign saying “later is weer doorpedalen/ nu eerst koffie en gebak halen” — there will be pedaling on later, but now first get coffee and pastries). Also it started to rain, and navigation was a little tricky — after eight days of remarkably well-signed route, you could say I was a little spoiled. But on we went, through Warmond, into Sassenheim and on into Buitenkaag, where despite all the navigational hooh-hah we were so ahead of schedule as to seriously consider finishing the whole route all the way through Oude Wetering, Roelofarendsveen, Rijpwetering, and back to Oud Ade. However, as the Oude Wetering back to Oud Ade part of that route was old hat to us by that point, and we were more interested in boating than cycling and didn’t want to risk returning to my grandparents’ house too late, we decided to take the ferries, first from Buitenkaag onto Kaag island, and then from Kaageiland back to Zevenhuizen, just outside Oud Ade.
Holy schnikeys, especially that second ferry. As soon as I was back on the water, all my feelings of being completely lost evaporated. Turns out I do know that part of the world pretty well — just not the land. We returned triumphantly to Oud Ade, trying not to notice that even the ducks had fled the wind-and-rain-swept water for the relative shelter of the polders, and turned up on Oma and Opa’s back porch a little wet, and Pepé in particular a little filthy, but all the better to show my parents that if just one morning’s riding in the rain could kick up that much dirt, just imagine — or not, if it you’d rather not trigger your obsessive-compulsive tendencies — what eight full days would do. In other words, we were ready to go boating.
Which we did, despite hilariously awful wind and rain that forced us to shelter under bridges whenever we got the chance. Peter got to open a few bridges (an essential part of any Dutch boating experience is working the draw- and/or turn-bridges across the sloten) and Opa took us all out for one last koffie met appelgebak at restaurant Kaagzicht before we turned back across the Kaag, eventually riding almost exactly as the ferry had taken us and Pepé a few hours before. I spent the rest of the day happily meditating on the two different perspectives on the landscape around Oud Ade — one old, one new. It was a wonderful, low-key ending to an amazing trip.
So. To bring everything back around to Hamell again,
Crime and Punishment? Love story.
The Crying Game? Also a love story.
And, to paraphrase just a bit, all this [censored] about the bike trip? Ultimately boils down to a love story. I could not have done this trip without Peter’s strong legs and even stronger enthusiasm pulling me along, and he could not have played fast and loose about lodging and scheduling without my best little innocent Dutch girl charm. We were greater than the sum of our parts on this adventure, which is to say we were just about every kind of awesome.
I love you, Peter. Thank you for a fantastic ride. Here’s to our next, and many more.
It was a fantastic ride and a fun adventure. Here is a rough approximation of our route and an alarmingly accurate map of where we slept.
- Day 1. Getting to the route from Oud Ade.
- We got our bike legs on, and rode from Oude-Ade to Gasperplas (and through a herd of sheep!). The stormy weather that night made us reconsider our plans for camping most of the way around.
- Day 2: Gaasperdam-Volendam
- The trailer thingie broke, but we fixed it in Amsterdam. We then made our way to the touristy town of Volendam, where we watched the Dutch under-21 team win the European championship.
- Day 3 – Volendam to Medemblik – 70km
- Made our way along the coast to beautiful Medemblik, stopping along the way at the Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen to learn all about the Zuiderzee and the building of the giant dike to close it off.
- Day 4 – Medemblik to Makkum – 63km
- Across the Afsluidijk (the giant dike previously mentioned). Tracy is filled with Dutch pride, and we make record time with the wind at our backs. We eat a wonderful dinner in a fancy restaurant. The best day of the trip, and that is saying a lot.
- Day 5 — Makkum to Ossenzijl, in the wind and rain.
- 40 mph winds and driving rain and a flat. This was a rough day. We did it, and the cabin was great.
- Day 6 — Holy crap! — I mean, Ossenzijl to Elburg.
- We make workmanlike progress towards our goal, and eat tasty fish and eel in Kampen. Our progress is interrupted when the trailer fix from Amsterdam fails, and we end up falling upon the mercy of Mevrouw Greveling. Everything works out, and we end up asleep that night in a warm bed feeling very lucky. Elburg seems to be our Coutances for this trip.
- Day 7 — Elburg to Huizen
- We get the trailer fixed and head out. We make speedy progress and end up in Huizen, a disconcertingly modern city.
- Day 8 – Huizen to Oude Ade, via the Amstel-Rhine Canal to close the loop!
- Final day, where we go through the fortified city of Naarden, close the loop, and then head back to Oud Ade triumphant!
Woo! We are done and alive! Almost 500 kilometers covered over the course of 8 days!
We began the day in Huizen, a disconcertingly modern city after all the old stuff we’ve been through. We were determined to set out early and make it back to Oud Ade in a reasonable amount of time, and so after breakfast we said goodbye to our friendly hosts and set off and were on the route at 9:10. It was a wonderful place to stay and were wonderful people. They were big Ajax supporters (Asterdam’s team, and the Dutch version of the Yankees) and Tracy’s whole family is Feyenoord (Rotterdam’s team, and the Dutch version of the Red Sox), but Tracy managed to restrain herself from singing Feyenoord fight songs until we were well on our way out of town.
This was a day of castles! We saw two of the most famous ones in the Netherlands — the city of Naarden is a fortified city built on the only road leading to Amsterdam (before the land was drained), and we also passed by the Muiderslot, which is a very castle-ish castle. Naarden was cool to ride through, and the Muiderslot was neat to see, even if only in the distance. Before we knew what was going on, around 11 am we rolled across the Amsterdam-Rhine canal and completed the route!
Hooray!
It came upon us as a surprise, and it also came immediately after the only real road-riding we had to do the entire trip. Dad, you must go biking in Holland. They have good coffee and good apple pie everywhere, everyone knows how to drive a car when there are bikes on the road, and the bike path system was so extensive that Tracy and I actually got a little indignant when we were forced to ride on seldom-used backcountry roads instead of solely on dedicated paths. Also, the only hills you encounter are about 30 feet tall — the distance from the bottom of a dike to the top of a dike — and they build hero-worship monuments to their civil engineers.
After saying hooray, we continued down the canal to retrace our way to near Gaasperplas and then do the first day backwards. We saw lots of downed branches and toppled trees, which continued to convince us that we had managed to do this awesome trip in some pretty strong conditions. We made our way to Abcoude, where we stopped at the local bike store (and indeed at every other bike store we saw) to ask if they had a 100 psi 20″x1.5″ tire. It turns out that nobody sells them anywhere because it is so unusual to have a high-pressure tire of that size. Everyone has 40 psi tires, but nobody has 100.
Oh well, instead we stopped for lunch, and while we were parking a guy came out and said (in English) “Hey! I just wanted to take a picture of your Bike Friday because mine is parked right down the street!”. Whoah. It was kind of surprising to hear American English after 7 days straight of it being my and Tracy’s secret language, and it turned out that there was a big group of American cyclists in the middle of their lunch in the pub we were going to eat in. After saying hello, we sat down and ordered coffee and fries and soup and uitsmiters and settled into our lunch.
We finished lunch and then rode through Uithoorn and called Tracy’s gramdparents telling them we were looking for “logies met ontbijt” (bed and breakfast), and asked if they had a room for the evening. It turns out that they were not yet full up at L&O van der Gaag, so after a quick stop for ice cream we pedaled on, with just one more stop for coffee and apple pie (koffie en appelgebak), we were back in Oud Ade at 4:50 pm, after covering almost 80k.
I was going to say that it was a big day or perhaps a long day, but looking back I see that they were all big days. Some were long because of distance, others because of winds and rain or because we saw so much or because the streets were windy or because lodging was so hard to come by or because the trailer hitch failed or because the tire blew out or because the temporary crappy trailer hitch failed. It was a fantastic trip. When we have ready access to the internet again one of us will compose a summary post with day-by-day maps. For now, I think I will just end it with:
Het was een hele goeie rit.*
* It was a very good ride.
We had breakfast courtesy of Mevrouw Greveling at 8 AM, the better to get to the bike store around the corner bright and early — they opened at 8:30, and sure enough we were there by 8:45. Only the hardcore old guys were there, and they leapt to the challenge of the broken trailer hitch. I learned the Dutch word for “hose clamps” (hey, this is valuable information) and when the rest of the crew arrived, our heroes actually sent someone out to get hose clamps before eventually making us a sturdy plate steel approximation of the piece that had broken. Awesome! We bought a spoke wrench out of gratitude and would have bought a spare tire if they’d had one, but 20 by 1.5 and 100 PSI turns out to be a tricky size, or so we learned repeatedly for the rest of the trip, when we stopped at every single bike store we saw just in case they had a spare for us.
Anyway. We returned to Mevrouw Greveling’s house and changed back into our bike gear and hit the road with a quick stop for bread and cheese and apples (yes, I made sure to get the lady’s address because boy oh boy is she ever getting thank-you postcards). Then we wound our way back through Elburg to the route, which took us to our detour through some lovely fields near the water (the Veluwermeer, to be exact). We sheltered under some trees during a brief hailstorm (see picture) and continued on all the way to Harderwijk, where we stopped for bread and cheese on one of many little beaches where windsurfers and kiteboarders were casting off and taking advantage of the strong winds coming over the water. The previous night’s weather reports had predicted gusts between wind force 3 and 5, much milder than Tuesday’s gale-strength 8(!) Anyway. In Harderwijk we called about the night’s lodgings, and found out that most of the places we’d thought to stay past Spakenburg were already full — both Eemnes and Blaricum had no lodgings to offer, so we looked past them to Huizen, where we finally lucked out. Then we double-checked the map and discovered that we had a pretty long day ahead of us — 50 to 60 kilometers left to go, for a grand total distance well over our self-imposed limit of 70-odd kilometers. Eek.
Then, to make matters briefly worse but eventually better, the freaking Germans caught up with us. You know, the ones we’d resolved to dust on Tuesday? Yeah, they hadn’t had a breakdown to slow them down. You can bet that motivated the hell out of me for the next 20-odd kilometers at least, and Peter was kind enough to pedal along. We blasted through Bunschoten and Spakenburg and made the ferry at Eemdijk in record time. Once across, I realized to my delight that our surroundings were really starting to look like Holland again, and took <a href=”a picture to celebrate. We followed the route along the outskirts of Eemnes, and eventually had a late lunch of tea and soup for me, and coffee and apple pie for Peter, followed by a cup of soup when mine proved irresistably delicious. And then we were on our way again.
Despite having told our hosts in Huizen that we had the wind against us and probably would not arrive until 7 or 8 PM, we rang their doorbell at 6:45 PM (probably thanks at least in part to my fanatical need to outrace the Germans). We parked our bike and filthy trailer in their back shed and took much-needed showers, before eventually braving the neighborhood shops to find dinner at an Italian restaurant. Mom, I ate pasta with red sauce, and it was delicious. Please do not disown me. Peter had the house tortellini, and we felt deliciously carb-loaded up for the following day (also I was a little floaty with exhaustion from our exertions). We returned to our lodgings and immediately fell asleep.
So we got kind of a late start today after yesterday’s exhausting efforts, and by the time we got back into Ossenzijl just after noon the local bike store was closed for their lunch break. Crap. No spare tires or tubes here. However, we did have an absolutely stupendously delicious late breakfast/brunch at Café Restaurant Stuitje — the house “uitsmijter” (literally translated, “bouncer” but think “fried egg sandwich with delicious trimmings”) featured three eggs topped with cheese, fried bacon, onions, bell peppers, tomatoes, and probably more that I’m forgetting, all on top of toast topped with thinly sliced ham. Yum. Peter and I had one each, and were very, very happy.
After that we rolled out of town on full stomachs along a narrow bike path that followed the Kalenbergergracht to the town of Kalenberg, through the Weerribben national park. We bumped over lots of little bridges designed to rotate to the side for passing boats, and Peter was basically every kind of awesome navigating such tricky terrain. It was slow going, however, and so we were glad to finally reach smoother riding, especially when it took us past a place called Het Waeter, where we stopped for coffee and appeltaart for Peter, and a pannekoek for me. Yum pannekoek. I will describe this delicacy at far greater length on TracyFood some time, but for now, imagine a really big plate covered with a very thin pancake (but thicker than a crèpe) that tastes like the very best comfort food ever.
Unfortunately, during our coffee break, the wind turned. I had arranged for us to lodge at a bed and breakfast in Nunspeet, some 70-odd kilometers from Ossenzijl, but by 2:30 PM, with over 50 kilometers left to go, we were starting to doubt we’d make our destination for the night. So we called the B & B back to relay that information, only to be reassured that we were welcome to arrive relatively late at night. We thanked them, and said not to worry if we didn’t come by, which turned out to be very much the right thing…
Pressing on, we left the route briefly in Blokzijl, to inquire if there were any bike stores nearby, but the VVV (tourist information center) could only direct us to the next town, Vollenhove. There, we managed to acquire spare tubes, but not spare tires or the loan of a pump with a gauge with which to determine whether the rear tire was finally inflated to the correct pressure. (We sort of got the brush-off, really, so we moved on.)
Still fighting the wind, which alternated between head-on and coming at our side, we struggled through Sint-Jansklooster and Zwartsluis, at which point we realized that the next big town, Kampen, was only 14 kilometers away, and our destination some 20 kilometers past it. It was 4 PM, and suddenly reaching our goal seemed possible again. We resolved to stop for dinner in Kampen and refuel before blasting on (or getting blasted, depending on the wind).
In Kampen, we crossed the main bridge and spotted a boat moored at the waterfront advertising IJsselmeer paling (eel), and even Kamper paling at that. Dine on local delicacies? Don’t mind if we do! And we did. Deliciously. Turns out the boat had a restaurant on board as well as Paling-en-Vishandel Reumer, a fish market specializing in eel, with some of the freshest product in town (more on that in just a bit). For dinner I had IJsselmeer paling fried in butter, with fries and a garnish of side salad, and Peter had the “verrassingsmenu” — surprise menu, three kinds of fish, breaded and fried, also with fries and side salad garnish, but also with coffee and ice cream for dessert. It seemed like a daring choice, and a lot of food, but it turns out he needed the calories and ate all his lekkerbek, scholfilet (flounder), and kibbeling (on the one hand, it was very nice of the cook/server to tell us what kind of fish they were, and on the other hand, I still only know the English names for one out of the three.) I was hard-pressed to finish just my eel (there was so much I suspect it may have been multiple eels) and most of the side salad, but had to leave some fries behind, even with Peter’s help. After dinner, I went down into the hold to use the head, only to duck back upstairs for a camera to prove that we were eating the freshest fish in town — there were entire tanks of eels down there, and a whole setup for cleaning them and getting them ready for the kitchen upstairs. Awesome.
Then after a pleasant chat with Reumer fishmaster Jan (possibly Jan Reumer, although I didn’t ask), we were back on our way, full of newfound fish-fed energy. Kampen seems like a really cool city, full of medieval architecture and generally radiating a sense of history we’re coming to associate with Hanseatic League cities, which we have resolved to visit more of (Stavoren, I am looking your way). But we had 20-odd kilometers to go, and so on we went.
Until the trailer fell off the back of the bike.
AGAIN.
Dammit.
We were outside a little nowhere place called Noordeinde when it happened — blink and you’ll miss it, but our Zuiderzeeroute guide book informs us that the town church was built with the stones from another church that was destroyed in a flood — however, our guidebook also claimed that there were lodgings to be had in the town, and we did not find them. So on we went, very slowly, because the trailer was now attached to the bike with a random strap from our camping gear which had served as a makeshift clothesline after my laundry adventures of the night before (the dryer alternated between blowing hot air on the clothes and tumbling them, but never both at once, and plenty of beeping and needing to be reset all the while, until I ran out of coins and resolved to just hang everything that was still damp out in the cabin to dry). So that was a little dicey, especially when the trailer hitch got caught in the spokes of the rear wheel after a speed bump and knocked the rear brake open. Eeeek. A friendly bystander told us Elburg was just 7.5 kilometers further along the road, so on we limped.
We passed a bed and breakfast on our way into the city, but they were full. Inside the city the streets were cobblestone and too scary to ride with the trailer as barely-secured as it was, so we walked. Outside the VVV office there was a map with a list of other possible lodgings, and we started calling them, starting with whatever was closest and not entirely ridiculously priced. At first it seemed like no one was answering the phone, but at last I got through to someone: Mevrouw Greveling of the Meeuwenmaatstraat.
“You’re calling awfully late,” she said (but in Dutch, of course).
“Yes,” I said. “We’re traveling by bike and ran into a little trouble and had to walk a ways. We had reservations in Nunspeet but I had to call them off.”
“In that case,” she said, “I am so gastvrij (hospitable, welcoming) as to offer you a bed for the night.”
At this point I began the first of many heartfelt thankyous. We followed her directions into her neighborhood, got lost, were redirected by a lady walking her dog, and finally arrived at Mevrouw Greveling’s house, where she and her friend Henk welcomed us and earned our eternal gratitude many, many times over.
“Peter,” I said, “the phrase you need to learn is ‘Wij zijn u eeuwig dankbaar.’” (We are eternally grateful to you.)
There was tea. And cookies. We had showers and got recommendations for bike stores and hardware stores, both within less than five minutes of walking, as well as a shortcut for tomorrow’s ride. And now there is a soft bed, with bathroom really near by. Tomorrow we get up early and have breakfast and visit the bike store and sort stuff out. But in the meantime, and for the rest of our lives, we are so very happy to have been rescued like the strays we briefly were.
-
Recent Comments
TracyFood » Mo… on Day 4 – Medemblik to Mak… Jack Ponsioen on Epilogue Ingunn on Day 7 — Elburg to H… Cap'n Tom on Day 7 — Elburg to H… Anneke on Day 6 — Holy crap! …
-
Tracy, Peter, and the pushmi-pullyu
More Photos
