Epilogue

10 July 2007 in Netherlands
Tags: Netherlands, ronde ijsselmeer

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.