Day 3 – Volendam to Medemblik – 70km

27 June 2007 in Netherlands, daily summary, ronde ijsselmeer

Peter here. Whew. Today was a very long day. The distance wasn’t long on the scale of long rides, but everything is longer when there is a trailer and a headwind involved. Also, we stopped for 3 hours in the middle to go to a museum. All in all, we ended up pulling into our lodgings (another cheap-yet-wonderful B&B) around 7:30, sopping wet and very tired.

So, again we we will start at the beginning, and then go through the middle until we get to the end. Then stop. We began today at Noemie’s Pension House in Volendam, which is just south of Edam (where there’s cheese!). We woke up happy after watching the Dutch under-21 team win the cup last night and then staying up late Internetting it up. We ate breakfast (bread and cheese and meat and jam and eggs and tea and chocolate) and then finished packing up, bought tasty bread rolls and cookies for lunch, got listings for places to stay in Medemblik, and headed out. The parking lot outside of our room had become a fleamarket/farmers’ market while we slept and ate, but that didn’t stop us. We headed north through first Edam and then then Hoorn, both of which were celebrating their 650th (!) anniversaries of being a city. Hoorn looked like a fun city – the Zuiderzeeroute takes you through the oldest heart of every city you go through, and the heart of Hoorn was quite nice.

After Hoorn we passed a whole pod of kiteboarders and discovered what was meant in the quote from our travel guide:

How strong is the lonely cyclist who, bent over his handlebars, forces his way against the wind? You will come to learn that, along the straight road along the IJsselmeer dike.

We proceeded to fight a truly fearsome headwind until we finally turned inland and proceeded along through more beautiful agrarian Holland. For a country that bills itself as the densest in the world (excepting city-states like Singapore and Monaco) there sure is a lot of farm land. The dikes along the coast are scenic to ride along (there’s a bunch of pictures that attempt to prove the scenicness of it all), the lowlands are the place to be if you want less wind.

After eating all the bread rolls, we rolled into scenic Enkhuizen, with a plan to eat some fish and see the Zuiderzee Museum. We did both! Tracy had IJsselmeer paling (eel) and I had Dutch sushi (nieuwe haring). And it turns out that today was the final day to see the special exhibit all about the building of the Afsluitdijk (the giant 30km dike that closes off the inland sea). It was a fantastic museum, and Tracy has much to day about it. I will restrict my comments to simply saying that large works of civil engineering are pretty inspiring, and that when constructing an earthen dike, turbulent flow is a very scary thing.

The museum and food ended up taking the better part of 3 hours, so we were running late when we headed out to finish the final 35k of our journey. We powered through the countryside, but ended up hitting the stupid time of the day in Andijk, so we went to the restaurant and got fried food and ice cream. It’s sure good that we did, but it turns out that the cafe we went to was pretty much the only open cafe anywhere in the surrounding area, so everybody who was in the stupid time of the day and needed food was there. This concentration of stupid was truly astounding, but we can’t complain too much – we were, after all, part of the problem. The fried food perked us up, and so we headed out towards Medemblik along the top of the IJsselmeer dike with new resolve and more energy, right through the bigass rainstorm and the headwinds of doom. After circumnavigating Medemblik’s local castle, we pulled into our B&B. Now, after tea and beer and tea, it is time to retire for the evening.

If you find yourself thinking of planning a cycle vacation in Holland, we highly recommend the B&B route. The “campings” are not particularly camping-like, and it’s nice to have a bed to sleep in. Particularly in this time of the year – it’s raining pretty much every day, and busting out old, damp gear to sleep in at night just isn’t appealing. So even if you plan on camping, try to alternate with rooms. They are pretty cheap, and they are dry.

Now, it is time for me to stumble into bed.