Day 4 – Medemblik to Makkum – 63km

27 June 2007 in Netherlands, daily summary, ronde ijsselmeer

(Peter again) Today we rode from Medemblik to Makkum, across the Afsluitdijk! After the museum exhibit about building the giant dike that closed off the Zuiderzee and how it was an achievement that united Holland, it was great to see the actual thing. It was, in fact, so awesome that Tracy says that every other paragraph of this entry should simply be the word awesome, so I think that’s what we’ll do.

Awesome!

After delicious breakfast at our pension Het Merelnest we made a brief excursion to the harbor of Medemblik and discovered that to do our laundry would cost 5 euro and take over 2 hours. Rather than lose precious time and our favorable wind, we headed out through town at the crack of 9:30, stopping briefly at a Spar grocery store for some bread and cheese and oranges.

Awesome!

We headed out of Medemblik, almost losing the way but recovering with aplomb, and we headed out into the new polders/farmland created by the Afsluitdijk project. The wind sped us north, and we passed through a beautiful nature reserve, in the middle of which was a monument in memory of 1945 when the retreating German army chose to blow up the dike. We emerged from the forest and, ate some lunch, and hit the beginning of the Afsluitdijk just before 1 o’clock, all the time being chased by a powerful and favorable wind.

Awesome!

The Afsluitdijk seems to have been Holland’s moon project, or perhaps their Grand Coulee Dam. It was an amazing achievement of science, technology, and politics all working together, and involved all three of those being worked to their absolute limits. The famous cliché in the Netherlands is that China has its great wall, and the Netherlands has its great dike. We passed through the locks on the west side, the Stevin Sluizen, and were at the monument 10 kilometers away in 20 minutes. That’s a sustained speed of 30km, while pulling a trailer.

Awesome!

The monument was impressive as all heck. There is a big heroic realist statue of the civil engineer that designed the project looking out over the dike that he didn’t live to see completed. The only marker on the statue is his last name, and the dates he was alive, because everyone in the Netherlands knows all about Lely. There was lots of other heroic stuff like that, including a frieze of people hammering things into place with the (translated) motto: a people that lives, builds for its future. We climbed the tower, looked out over the North Sea/Waddenzee, and then got back on our bikes and continued to fly down the 90 meter wide, 30 km long strip of land.

Awesome!

Biking along the Afsluitdijk is like a textbook lesson in the principles of perspective. The road, bike path, and indeed all visible land, form perfectly straight lines that go directly towards a vanishing point on the horizon. The road is perfectly straight, and perfectly level, and the land on either side is unchanging in profile. It’s a Zen experience. As we settled into a rhythm, we found ourselves going faster and faster and becoming more and more like a freight train. If there isn’t a race from one end of the dike to the other, there certainly should be. The road is so flat and straight and good for biking it’s almost like an unwound velodrome.

Awesome!

We quickly reached the locks on the other side, the Lorentz Sluizen, and we headed south towards Makkum feeling like we had done a pretty special thing. We reached our planned stop 2.5 hours ahead of schedule, thanks to the helping winds. After moving into our room and waiting out the rainstorm that chased us all day, we decided to have a big fancy dinner in celebration. I am sure that there will be a TracyFood post about it, but I had the best fondue I’ve ever had (including the fondue I had in Chamonix, France, in the shadow on Mont Blanc) and also had a fantastic rhubarb creme brulee. Now, with full bellies and an accomplished feeling, we head towards the flopover day of our trip. Tomorrow, sometime midday, we will have gone so far around the Zuiderzee that we will no longer be heading away from Oud Ade, but will instead be heading towards home.

Awesome!