Ronde Ijsselmeer – Day 1. Getting to the route from Oud Ade.

23 June 2007 in Netherlands, daily summary, ronde ijsselmeer

Hello! Peter here. If it’s not marked otherwise, it’s probably mostly written by Tracy. So, we are sitting in our 2.5-person flashlight tent and the rain is smashing down. There’s thunder and lightning, and we are dry and protected, and the folded up bike fits in the vestibule (see pictures for proof and a slightly-manic look on my face). Heck, we made it into the tent before it really started coming down! And a good thing, too. It really is raining and thundering extremely loudly. So, that’s the end of the day, which is in the Gaasperplas campground about 15km outside of Amsterdam. Now, let’s take it from the top.

We woke up this morning at Tracy’s grandparents place in Oud Ade. We packed up the trailers, and after a leisurely breakfast of bread and cheese and chocolate and tea, headed out at the crack of 9:45. (Wow. Just when I thought it couldn’t rain any harder, Holland proves me wrong — time to fire up the windmills, guys!) We waved goodbye to Oma and Opa van der Gaag and went from Oud Ade towards the neighboring town of Rijpwetering. It was a pleasantly familiar start for what would prove to be a wonderful day of cycling (“fietsen” in Dutch). In order, we went through Oud Ade, Rijpwetering, Roelofarendsveen (how’s those for real Dutch names, eh?), went along the Braassemermeer (Braassemer (some kind of fish) Lake), took a ferry to cross a 30 meter wide canal in Oude Wetering, went past Leimuiden, Bilderdam (where we made a silly backtrack along a very skinny bike path), followed the Amstel River to a dairy selling locally produced ice cream (which we sampled, of course — bread and cheese and fries and ice cream will be themes to watch for on this trip…) and then continued along the river to Uithoorn (which was an even skinnier path where we had to dodge sheep!), and finally took our first long break of the day.

We spent a little over 2 hours in Uithoorn – we bought a SIM card for the cell phone so we could make reservations, we ate a bunch of cherries, we went to the VVV/ANWB (kind of like a cross the between AAA and a local tourist information center, and we ate a wonderful lunch of bread and cheese and salami whilst looking out over the Amstel. If you are ever boating or biking in the area, there are free toilets and showers in Uithoorn. We called ahead and made sure Gaasperplas had enough room for us, and then headed out to finish our journey. (holy crap this is a storm. I saw lightning and only counted up to 3 before the thunder hit)

From Uithoorn, we stopped following the Amstel, and instead followed a much smaller canal and followed the landelijk fietsroute (LF) signs. The landelijk fietsroute network is a bunch of really nice bikepaths that link all of Holland. They are like a giant grid across the country, and are totally great. We followed LF2 to LF7 and then took another 30 meter ferry and came across a sign showing the extensive bike route network in Utrecht. A little later, we stopped and had tea and (yes) bread and cheese at a little shop thaat also ran a bridge over the local canal, which I believe was the Oude Waver.

After that, we continued to Abcoude and stopped for ijs (ice cream) and kroket (deep fried somethingorother) and not nearly enough patat met (fries with mayonnaise-based fritesaus). Lesson learned – we are hungry and using up calories. Always order the large fries, and probably order two of them. Also, an extra ice cream would not go amiss. Abcoude seemed like a really cool little town. While we were eating a dutch couple came up and started chatting with us (and by “us”, I mean “Tracy while Peter struggles to understand but just ends up a bit lost”) and they said that we were very close to our eventual destination.

So, we headed out, confident that we were near, and sure enough, within 45 minutes we were pulling into Gasperplas. We set up camp, decided to hide the bike in the vestibule, and right as we finished all that it started to rain. Now, we are hiding in the tent waiting for the rain to slow down, upon which we will get some food in our bellies and go to sleep, feeling like we had a good day.

Lessons of the day:

• You may think that a path is skinny, but there are always skinnier paths, some of which also have sheep to dodge.
• The end of the day truly is “stupid time”. Be careful of any decisions you might make. We are fortunate that the tent is so easy to set up, because we were pretty unprepared for complications. Folding the bike almost did us in.
• Always stop for ice cream. And maybe french fries.
• Holland totally rocks the pastoral ideal. And it does this even inside the triangle created by its three largest cities. They must have a lot of land use planning.