An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors: Europe Trip Part III: Cycling

Every full day of the cycling trip worked as follows: breakfast available at the hotel at 7 AM (always a fairly lavish buffet). The group would meet at 8:30 for a briefing of the day's activities. From there we'd either start riding directly from the hotel or be shuttled to the start of the ride. Everyone had a bike computer loaded with turn-by-turn directions, so you could ride at your own pace. There'd be a mid-morning rest stop (one of the vans would park along the route and would provide water and snacks - and a chance for riders who didn't want to continue to bail), group lunch at a restaurant, an afternoon rest stop (same story as in the morning), and you'd be done riding by 4 PM. At that point you'd have a chance to relax, and then dinner would be a European duration (2-3 hours) affair at a restaurant. Every night I'd look at my watch at the end of dinner expecting it to be around 8 PM, only to discover it was already 9:30 or 10. Those long dinners, plus the fact that it stays light much later at the north latitudes, would fool me every time.

Monday 5/15 (48 miles)

Today's ride started from the hotel and took us through a national park featuring coastal dunes - the Nationaal Park Zuid Kennermerland - kind of like riding through Cape Henlopen Park in Delaware, but much bigger and wilder. While the scenery was quite beautiful, I didn't take any pictures of the dunes because there was no way I was going to capture large scale nature with my little phone camera. At one point we passed a pack of wild horses - like at Assateague - including one who was standing in the middle of the bike trail. This was the coldest day of the week, with misty and windy weather. The Netherlands is dead flat, but there's a saying, "the mountains of Holland are made of wind", meaning that riding into the constant wind makes it feel like riding up a mountain. The forecast called for steady rain in the afternoon, so I figured I'd probably quit riding at the lunch stop.

Historic windmills are everywhere!

Cute animals at the lunch break

Our ride took us through tulip country. Alas, we were a little late for tulip season; the fields were mostly bare, with just a few literal late bloomers here and there. Lunch was at De Tuliperij, a tulip farm which also operated a small snack bar and a sizable gift shop. While we ate the owner gave us a little talk about growing tulips. His real product is bulbs, not cut flowers, and it takes several years for a bulb to grow large enough to sell.

The tulip guy gives his talk at lunch

Our trip leader Becca giving instructions

After lunch it wasn't yet raining and my app wasn't showing any imminent precipitation (in advance of the trip I had downloaded the Netherlands-specific Buienradar app) and so some of us made the decision to keep riding. At the afternoon rest stop we made the same calculation and once again decided to keep riding. Not everyone kept riding, and in the end just four of us (retired teacher Scott, hardcore cycling cardiologist Sarah, me, plus an eBiker - who didn't count) rode the full 48 miles from the previous night's hotel to the Hotel des Indes in The Hague.

The Hotel des Indes has an interesting history. Built in 1858 as a city palace of some nobleman, during WW II the hotel served as the headquarters for the occupying Nazi forces, while at the same time the staff was hiding a small group of Jewish refugees (who all survived!) in the pigeon coops on the roof of the hotel. Everything in Europe has a complex history.

My fancypants room at Hotel des Indes

My room number in The Hauge. Too bad I didn't have this room number in Amsterdam

Dinner was at Les Basaliek, a short walk from the hotel. I had the aubergine with miso cream appetizer and cod as a main dish. The dessert had a fancy name, but was in effect strawberries and marshmallow fluff over crumbled graham crackers.

Remember the crazy couple from Sunday night, who over dinner told us that time isn't real? Well, by chance I wound up sitting with them again at Les Basaliek, and things got even weirder. As soon as they referred to the COVID pandemic as the "scamdemic” I buckled in for a wild ride. They went on about how their stupid governor Newsom closed everything for way too long, and how it’s obvious that this was a genetically engineered virus which escaped from the Wuhan lab’s “gain of function” research, because of the “dual arginines”. This led to a heated discussion with fellow traveler Ellen, who was seated at the table as well. I tried a couple of times to very obviously change the subject, since I didn't really want to be having this argument at dinner while on vacation - to no avail. The couple kept saying that you have to learn to think like a scientist and you have to ignore the media and read books so you understand what’s going on - a variant of the “do your own research” line you commonly hear from conspiracy theorists as a rationale for dismissing expert opinion in favor of their own cockamamie theories. Anyway, when I got back to my room I looked up the dual arginine theory and while it had actually been spread in no less of a publication than The Wall Street Journal, it’s in fact a debunked conspiracy theory. Basically it’s saying that this dual arginine structure in the virus is very rare in nature (our dinner friends had exaggerated and said it's never found in nature) and so anything which has it must be engineered. But, of course, very rare occurrences do happen, so the rarity of the dual arginine structure in fact proves nothing.

Tuesday 5/16 (17 miles)

Tuesday we were shuttled from the hotel to Kinderdijk, a UNESCO World Heritage Site near Rotterdam which contains nineteen historic 18th century windmills. The setting is beautiful and the windmills are striking. I never really considered why The Netherlands has so many windmills. Being "mills", I just assumed that they were used for grinding grain - or some such purpose. It turns out that the historic windmills are primarily water pumps and served to constantly pump out the ever-leaky Netherlands. About a third of the Netherlands is reclaimed land which sits at or below sea level, and the country has to constantly be pumped out to avoid sinking back into the ocean. This need continues today, but the pumping is accomplished by more modern devices - which look like giant screws - rather than windmills, though apparently some of the old windmills are kept in working order as backups for the modern systems.

At Kinderdijk we got to walk around the windmills and even see the inside of one (people lived in them!).

Our trip leaders Becca and Sean. For some reason, Tuesday was glitter day

All glittered up

A better look at my glitter

Pre-ride briefing

Kinderdijk scenery

Windmills at Kinderdijk

Residence inside the windmill

Living space inside the windmill

Most days, the morning pit stop was at a business or public park where there was bathroom access, but I guess there wasn't any appropriate commercial establishment at the right spot on Tuesday's route. Instead, they had contracted with some old dude named Martin who allowed us to take a break (and use the facilities) at his farmhouse - though it wasn’t clear to me whether that tiny building was his actual dwelling, because it was just one of a cluster of buildings on the property. In fact, he invited a few of us into one of the other buildings. When I walked in he was describing to (retired teachers) Scott and Paula how he had been a sailor and wound up in Jerusalem (he used the Hebrew pronunciation, “Yerushalayim”) during the Six Day War and worked on a kibbutz, and he showed off the Israeli Defense Force hat he still had as a souvenir. It’s not 100% clear to me if the guy was Jewish. I thought maybe he was a Jewish WW II survivor, but when I asked him in Yiddish if he spoke Yiddish, he didn’t understand, and his English wasn't great so I couldn't really get the answers to my questions from him. But he did know “shalom”! I asked the other people who had been part of this conversation, but no one had an answer as to how his Israeli past had come up as a conversation topic. About ten minutes before getting to Martin's we had passed a house flying an Israeli flag, so I also momentarily speculated that maybe this was an area which was home to Dutch Jews. But no. I think he was just a Dutch sailor who just wound up in Israel at a key moment in history.

Martin is also an accordionist!

Martin, his dog, and some sheep

It's a mystery as to why this house flying an Israeli flag.

We rode on. After a loop through the historic market square of Gouda (pronounced “Howda”, it turns out), we stopped for lunch in a converted “Captain’s house” - apparently where ship captains would go while their ships were in port. They had a nice vegetarian option for lunch - tomato soup, bread, cheese, babaganoush, pickled beets, a tiny slice of quiche, and white asparagus. Then they gave us each a shot of some sort of local liquor.

The group eats lunch at the "Captain's House"

Lunch

After lunch, 23 of the 25 of us opted to go back to The Hague, so we could have a chance to go to museums, explore, etc. (only the true hardcores Sarah and Scott rode on). After a shower and a quick nap I visited the Mauritshaus Museum, full of Rembrandts, Vermeers, and other Dutch Art. Not a huge museum, but a good one. The highlights of the museum include Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson. I rode only 17 miles on Tuesday, but in trade got time for sightseeing.

That night was dinner on your own. Not wanting another three hour dinner, I declined invitations from folks in the group and had dinner by myself at a Neapolitan pizza place. Vegetable pizza and a big ol’ Peroni beer - perfect.

The Hague

Pieter Codde's "Portrait of a Married Couple". Despite having been painted in 1634, this couple seems very modern to me. I don't know why, but I really liked this one.