Day 8 – Huizen to Oude Ade, via the Amstel-Rhine Canal to close the loop!

5 July 2007 in Netherlands, daily summary, ronde ijsselmeer

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.