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.

Guy with a cubic zirconia earring with a Girl with a Pearl Earring

Dutch pizza

Tuesday I was also riding by myself a lot, so I felt free to stop for pictures. Here's some more Dutch scenery:

Detail from a bar in Gouda.

Gouda town square

Continue to Part IV

Europe Trip Part II: The bike tour begins

Sunday my trip completely switched gears, as I went from on-my-own, figuring everything out seat-of-the-pants, to being on a tour where everything was taken care of. The last thing I had to figure out independently was how to get myself to our meeting point, outside the Starbucks at my old haunt Sloterdijk Station. I got there with plenty of time to spare and those of us there early grabbed a big table in Starbucks, where we were joined by other trip participants as they trickled in. The first people I met were two women traveling sort of together. They were individual travelers who had met on a previous Backroads trip and had decided to do this one together. They both looked to be my age or maybe a little older, which immediately assuaged one of my fears: that I was going to be the slow old guy amongst a group of hardcore cyclists, much as Valerie’s cousin Paul had been the old guy among a much younger group on a long-ago trip to Belize (my introduction to active/adventure travel). Tannie (a feisty woman from Chambersburg, PA) told me right up front that she was 69 years old, and I found out somewhere along the way that Ellen (semi-retired and recently divorced, from Lewes, DE) was 64. Those two became sort of my buds for the trip, since we were among the minority of trip participants who weren’t traveling with some sort of partner or family members. Next to show up was a group of six women - obviously a family. They turned out to be three sisters in my general age range, originally from Peru but long-time residents of Miami, their slightly older cousin, and one of the sisters’ two 20-something daughters. We met one of our trip leaders, Becca, who checked people off on her checklist as they showed up and collected everyone’s food allergies and restrictions. When I overheard one of the three sisters say that her food restrictions include pork or shellfish, it confirmed what I had already suspected, that the group of six was Jewish. I commented to her that I usually just say “vegetarian” rather than spell out the intricacies of kosher rules, thereby exchanging gang signs so that we knew each other were Jewish. It turns out Ellen is Jewish too, but I didn’t find this out until much later. As other participants arrived I was relieved to find I wasn’t the only guy on the trip, though roughly three quarters of the group of 25 were female, and I was something of a curiosity for being a married guy traveling alone (apparently it’s more common for wives to travel without their husbands - like the Real Jewish Peruvian Housewives of Miami were doing - than for husbands to travel without their wives).

We were ushered onto a bus, which shuttled us to Edam - the first of several cheese towns on our itinerary. Along the way Becca and the other American trip leader, Sean, gave us an overview of how our days would go, and what we’d be doing that day.

At Edam we were issued our bikes, and we met the other two members of our Backroads team, Babette and Nicky, who are both Dutch. While Becca and Sean rode with the group, Babette and Nicky handled the support logistics: driving the support vans, setting up food at rest stops, and so on. As they issued bikes I discovered that only two of us had opted for drop bar "performance" road bikes; the rest of the group was split between easy-riding flat bar hybrids and eBikes. Seeing that mix of bike selections further erased any anxieties I had about keeping up with the group. The other road bike rider was a young woman named Sarah who was a recent MD/PhD taking a quick break before starting a fellowship in cardiology. Another anxiety of mine assuaged - our group had an in-house cardiologist! Sarah was outlier to the group as well, being both another solo traveler and at 30 the only Millennial outside of the Peruvian daughters. She was the most powerful rider of the group (not surprising, being half as old as the rest of us!) and usually jumped out and rode ahead of the pack every day. She’s a little intense, but always in a positive way. A thin, high energy little woman, she reminded me of a little of a younger version of Valerie’s friend Laura, but with a very positive attitude.

Backroads provides a couple of support vans throughout the trip, so every day you have the option of riding the whole route or bailing out at one of the rest stops or lunch and shuttling the rest of the way by van. There’s an app which provides information about each day’s rides and routes, and each bike is equipped with a Wahoo GPS device loaded with turn-by-turn directions for the day’s rides. Since you’re following the GPS, not the leader, you can ride at your own pace - stop to take a picture if you want, take a break, explore a side road, whatever. Very cool.

One of the Backroads support vans

Another surprise - a Jewish cemetery in Edam

The long ride for the day was Edam to our lodging, the Hotel Duin en Kruidberg, about 30 miles. Along the way we got acquainted with our bikes (the road bikes had electronic Shimano Di2 shifting - also very cool), got our first taste of the beauty of the Dutch countryside as well as how to navigate the extensive bike path system, and saw our first windmills. Our lunch break was a restaurant waterfront at Twiske Lake. The Netherlands, being partially below sea level, has a lot of waterfront: lakes, canals, rivers, and oceans. I think just about everywhere in the country is waterfront. Nice weather, and a nice first ride.

Typical scenery

First windmill sighting!

One of several little ferries along this ride

More Dutch countryside

When I rode up to the hotel I laughed out loud. I had gone from staying in a broom closet in Amsterdam to Downton F’in Abbey. The Hotel Landgoed Duin & Kruidberg is an elegant old country estate, and I felt silly walking in wearing my goofy bike clothes. I guess it’s the same as walking into the manor house wearing one’s muddy equestrian garb would have been in the old days.

The Hotel Landgoed Duin & Kruidberg

My room at the Duin & Kruidberg

After settling in we met out on the patio for a welcome cocktail. In retrospect, this was a strangely stiff gathering - everyone was a little formal and reserved, whereas after a day or so together we were all much more relaxed. In part, I think I just happened by chance to speak first with some of the more reserved people on the trip. I met Michael, a retired high-powered attorney and law professor of some sort and his wife. Michael turned out to be really nice once you got to know him, but he’s quiet, which initially I misinterpreted as standoffish. His wife radiates a little more of an Upper East Side vibe - so I misread them as being a little snooty. I also talked with a couple from Rhode Island. She is an internist; He designs sonars for a living, so he and I had some things to talk about!. They had left their two young children home with the grandparents and amazingly, several days into the trip when I asked them how the kids were doing they said they didn’t know - that their (and the grandparents’) philosophy is out sight, out of mind, so they hadn’t spoken directly with the kids since they’d left. They were very nice and were among the stronger non-eBike riders, so I hung with them while riding a few times over the course of the week.

Over dinner, things got a little weird. The meal itself was fine, if striving a little too hard to be fancy. I had the white asparagus appetizer, then the vegetarian main dish was in effect a gussied up veggie burger on a plate with artistically arranged vegetables. Dessert was lychee nut custard and coconut cake with lychee nut ice cream on a rosewater emulsion base - all presented as little blobs which looked like maybe food from Star Trek.

The weird part wasn't the food, which was actually OK. Rather one of the couples at my table was a little, umm, odd. The woman of the couple had had perhaps a bit too much to drink, and was going on about her view of the differences between men and women: how men are hunters vs. women being gatherers, and how that affects all sorts of behavior, such as the ability to navigate, or knowing about flowers. She somehow segued from that into how time isn’t real, and ultimately wound up expressing her discomfort with the number of Asians and Mexicans in the area where they live in California. I was trying to give her the benefit of the doubt - figuring maybe her conversation was influenced by jet lag and alcohol - but she definitely had too many toes over the line into racism towards the end of her monologue. European dinners are long (our dinners were typically 2-3 hours); by the end this one started to feel very long.

Continue to Part III

Europe Trip Part I: Amsterdam

Friday 5/19

I arrived in Amsterdam after an overnight flight during which I got maybe three hours of fitful sleep - the flight itself has a duration of nearly eight hours, but the takeoff, landing, beverage service, meal service, etc., leave little quite time to sleep. Thanks to some advance research I had no trouble finding the train to the city; however what was supposed to have been a fifteen minute ride turned out to be much longer, as the train ground to a halt about ten minutes into the trip, then just sat. And sat. And sat. The train crew would occasionally give updates over the PA, but only in Dutch, which wasn’t of any help to me. The only word i could catch was “Politie” - police. So we were stopped due to some sort of police action. Since the train was fairly empty there was no one nearby I could inquire of as to what was going on. Finally I heard a woman at the far end of the car speaking on the phone in English, saying that the train was held up because someone was on a railroad bridge, threatening to jump.

From the Dutch Rail web site: "Person on the Tracks"

So, travel adventure number one: after about 45 minutes the train finally started moving again, and the crew made an announcement (this time repeated in English) that we’d all have to get off when the train stopped at Sloterdijk Station (ironically, where I was to meet the bike tour group two days later) and take another train the rest of the way to Amsterdam Centraal Station. I didn’t really have any idea of what I was doing - would my ticket card work a second time? Where did I need to go? How do I find the right train? Well, a combination of just following the crowd and checking the station signs led me to the right train and I finally made it into Amsterdam - a full three hours after my flight had landed.

I had read about Amsterdam’s mellow cafes (distinct from the “coffeeshops”, which is their euphemism for cannabis stores), and after depositing my suitcases in a locker at the train station I headed for Cafe Cobalt right near the train station, which turned out to be the perfect little European café - complete with contented café cat. I ordered French toast (in case you’re wondering, the Dutch term for French toast is “wentelteefjes”) and coffee, needing a caffeine kick to keep me going through the day after a nearly sleepless night.

Café Cobalt

Wentelteefjes and coffee

I had downloaded a free app containing walking tours of Amsterdam. The app is a barebones affair - no audio or other media, just guidance to locations of the sites on each tour, and a description of each. I set out on the tour of historical Jewish Amsterdam. The first stop on the tour was Waterlooplein market, which started out as the “Jewish Market”. These days it’s a flea market of mostly junk - though someone looking for vintage clothes could do well shopping there. From there I went to the Jewish Museum, which traces the history of how The Netherlands was more tolerant of religious diversity than most more religious European countries during the Renaissance/Enlightenment periods and so became a haven for Jews, who also meshed well with the commerce-oriented bent of the Dutch. Sadly, like many chapters in Jewish history, the Jews were welcome until they weren’t; the museum also treats the Nazi era as well as well as something of a Jewish cultural revival today.

Waterlooplein Flea Market

Canals are everywhere in the city

Admission to the Jewish Museum also gets you into the historic Portuguese Synagogue, built in 1675 and still in use today. The Esnoga, as it is also known, has not been updated - the building has neither modern HVAC nor even electric lighting - the sanctuary is still illuminated by giant candle chandeliers.

The Esnoga (historic Portuguese synagogue)

From there I just walked and walked through the central area of the city, touching on the edge of the red light district, as well as the trendy Jordaan district. I did poke my head into a “coffeeshop” just to see what they’re like - nothing special, and surprisingly skeevy for a long-established and mostly legal industry. There are a lot of weed-related shops in the city. And lots of cheese shops. I’m guessing there isn’t a clear head or coronary artery in the whole city.

Cheese, cheese, and more cheese ...

... and lots of cannabis-related businesses

Finally, as my hotel check-in time approached, I made my way to the train station. After retrieving my backs I fumbled around for a bit trying to find the right tram to get me to my hotel - but I figured it out.

If the “Centrum” area of Amsterdam, where I had spent the day, was like Amsterdam’s midtown Manhattan, the hotel I stayed in was kind of the Upper West Side. I stayed in Amsterdam’s museum district (ironically, while my hotel was directly across the street from the Rijksmuseum, the major art museum, I didn’t get to go as tickets were sold out - the Van Gogh Museum was sold out as well, and there wasn’t a chance in hell of getting tickets to the Vermeer exhibit). The neighborhood was peaceful and artsy, but still near the action.

My hotel was quite nice, but the room was the smallest hotel room imaginable. Smaller than rooms in Manhattan. Smaller tha a cruise ship cabin. Really tiny. But it was OK - I wasn’t there to hang out in the room. 

My tiny hotel room

I walked a couple of blocks and across a canal (pretty much every walk in Amsterdam involves crossing at least one canal) to a shopping street where I grabbed take-out vegetarian ramen (not as good as the place Ted had taken us to in California, but still quite good), and a big cookie from another takeout joint (which also offered tempting vegetarian sandwiches). I ate dinner in my room and then finally succumbed to my exhaustion and got a good night’s sleep.

I didn't visit the Cannabis Museum, only walked by - if I had gone in perhaps I would have learned the reasons for the Hebrew on the sign (it says, "Welcome to the Cannabis Museum").

Bicycles are everywhere!

Yeah, right

Saturday 5/20

In the morning, based on my walking tour app, I decided to explore De Pijp, said to the the Bohemian part of town - a 10 minute walk from my hotel. My first stop there was the Albert Cuyp market. While the Waterlooplein Market had been for the most part used junk, Albert Cuyp was much more modern and upscale, with vendors selling prepared food, cheeses, clothing, flowers, seafood, vegetables, sundries, housewares, and more. Since my breakfast had been just part of an oatmeal cookie, my first order of business was to get a fresh, warm stroopwafel from one of the market’s vendors. A stroopwafel is a thin waffle sliced in half and spread with warm caramel, making a sandwich. At home I’ve had prepackaged stroopwafels, but I had never before had a fresh one. Excellent, though very sweet. Not exactly the most balanced breakfast, but what can you do? Fortified, I strolled the market and the surrounding neighborhood. Lots of interesting shops and international restaurants. I took a break and got a coffee at - gasp - Starbucks. Yes, Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts are common here. In fact, the very first thing I saw at Schipol airport when I walked off the plane was a Starbucks - something I found a little depressing. 

Albert Cuyp Market

Unsurprisingly, there are cheese vendors there

And stroopwafels

Flower vendor at Albert Cuyp Market

This was a surprise

I had considered doing a canal boat tour in the afternoon. Canal boat tours are a big thing in Amsterdam, but bicycles are more my speed, so I booked a two hour bike tour from Yellow Bikes. 

OK, let me talk about bikes in Amsterdam for a minute. The Netherlands is said to be a cyclist’s paradise, something I can confirm from my week of cycling there, but Amsterdam is something else. It’s a crazy Mad Max admixture of cars, pedestrians, and bikes, and the rule seems to be that the most aggressive person has the right of way. Bikes come at you from everywhere - sometimes seemingly out of nowhere. It’s an old city of narrow streets, not based on a grid, so even if you look both ways before crossing you can wind up tangled with a bike which has appeared out of an alley or side street which juts in at some strange angle. The Netherlands has more bikes than people (even though 20,000 bikes per year wind up in Amsterdam’s canals!) and lots of great bike infrastructure. But Amsterdam - sheesh! Also, most people are biking for transportation and so are in street clothes. I saw only a few Lycranauts in matchy-matchy Spandex™ riding performance bikes - though those folks were the only ones wearing helmets. I guess helmets are not a thing in The Netherlands. 

By Day 2 I had a better handle on the transit system and had no problem catching the right tram to Nieuwezijds Kok to meet my bike tour. While walking to the tram stop I discovered that my hotel was adjacent to Amsterdam’s equivalent of Fifth Avenue, home to boutiques from all the major luxury brands:  Chanel, Gucci, Hermes, Rolex, etc. I guess those stores are a tourist attraction in themselves, as people were waiting in lines for admission to many stores. I also made a note of an amazing looking bakery I passed in that neighborhood.

For our bike tour we were each issued a “Dutch bike” - heavy cruiser bikes with step through frames simlar in style to American bikeshare bikes. A lot of the Dutch cyclists ride bikes of this type, which are comfortable and stable, if heavy and slow. It was a pretty nice two hour ride. Went through some of the city’s neighborhoods and past a number of sites, including the Ann Frank House, which I had skipped on the previous day’s Jewish Amsterdam tour, since I’ve visited there before. We cruised a loop through Amsterdam’s big park, Vondelpark, which was teeming with people on what was apparently the first warm, sunny weekend of spring. And it was from our tour guide Jort that I learned the factoid about the 20,000 bikes tossed into the canals each year.

On the bike tour (helmets are not a thing in The Netherlands)

The bike tour also got me a taste of what it’s like to navigate Amsterdam as a cyclist rather than a pedestrian. At another point one of our group had a very close call complete with cursing (in English) when one of the riders on our group started moving at apparently the wrong time. You see, at some intersections there are separate signals for cars, cyclists, and pedestrians, so it can be confusing to people unaccustomed to the multiple signal system to know when to go. Also, there are cycletracks (separate protected bike lanes) which seem to always have the right of way, even over green lights on the perpendicular street - or least the people riding in them behave like they do. 

Our guide Jort points out the Picasso statue in Vondelpark

A very narrow house (the red brick)

After my tour, since I hadn’t eaten since my morning stroopwafel,  I grabbed some food at a fast-foodish Asian place. Then I headed back to the hotel, stopping at the bakery I had noted earlier to get a blueberry muffin for Sunday’s breakfast. I was due to meet my group at 9 AM at Sloterdijk and so I wanted to have a quick breakfast on hand. I sat in the hotel’s lovely courtyard and jotted down my trip notes so far, then took a quick nap.

Hotel courtyard

At dinnertime I headed out to the nearby Leidseplein, a big plaza with lots of cafes and such. It’s also the center of the city’s nightlife scene. My first goal was to find The Melkweg, a famous nightclub where John and I had hung out when we were in Amsterdam decades ago. The Melkweg has multiple performance spaces, and while the band didn’t grab me, I had thought of attending a showing of a Little Richard biopic film in their theater, but figured I’d probably fall asleep sitting at a movie and so decided against it. I picked up a falafel sandwich at a fast foodie place for dinner (good falafel!), and stopped in a supermarket where I picked up some yogurt to augment my breakfast (which required discerning which containers were yogurt and which were “kwark”, an apparently similar dairy product unknown in the US), along with a beer to round off my evening.  The last think I did was to track down and log a geocache in the neighborhood of my hotel, and then I went back to the hotel to re-pack and sleep.

Outside The Melkweg

Damn good muffin

Their little free libraries are a touch more elegant than ours (this is also where the geocache was hidden)

For the bike trip, if you want to “clip in” you have to supply your own pedals - thry’ll only supply flat pedals. I had indicated that I was going to be bringing pedals, but in re-packing my suitcase I realized that I had forgotten to pack the pedals - duh! - so I sent a quick email to the trip leaders saying I’d need their flat pedals after all. Not a problem.

Amsterdam at sunset

Continue to Part II

2023 SK102

SK102 is the Chesapeake Paddlers Association's annual on-water skills training weekend. I've attended, taught at, and written about it (search the blog for "SK102" to find past write-ups)  it many times. It's a geat chance to learn kayak skills for experienced paddlers, and it's generally just a great hang. It's held on someone's expansive lakefront property at Lake Anna, where 90ish people show up, camp, and play on the water.

While rain some time during the weekend is seemingly inevitable (my 2016 writeup is title "A very wet SK102"), this year was particularly rainy. The forecast for Friday was seemingly endless amounts of dumping rain, which was a real demotivator for me. I had just gotten back from a somewhat emotional trip to Brooklyn - a farewell both to the place and to my brother who, after living his whole life in the same neighborhood, is retiring and leaving the area. I moved away over thirty years ago, but over the decades I've still maintained a connection to the borough because I still had family there, giving me reason to go back and eat at my favorite neighborhood pizza place (the celebrated DiFara's), go for runs on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, and generally walk the old streets. Now, there will be no more Aronsons left in Brooklyn. Will anything bring me back there, or is my association with the place now merely history?

Anyway, I was completely unmotivated to head out on another trip and to set up a tent and in the pouring rain. Fortunately, my friend Rob was attending the event but not camping - he is recovering from a broken leg - and he invited me to stay over in his room at the decidedly inglorious Lake Anna Motel. Encouraged by the idea of dry sleeping arrangements, I loaded my kayak gear, camping gear (yeah, I still brought it), and music gear and headed south.

Upon my arrival I found a mess, thanks to the rain. You have to remember, this event is at a private home, not a place really set up heavy traffic and when large numbers of cars show up in the rain it turns into a muddy nightmare, with car traffic chewing up the lawn like crazy. By the time I got there they weren't letting any more people park in the instructor area, and the general parking area (a big grassy field which is actually a neighbor's land) was borderline in terms of traction. I was one of the last allowed to park there - everyone else had to park along the road or at the community marina.

I engaged in a somewhat soggy version of the usual Friday afternoon instructor socializing, and around dinner time they did go ahead with the instructor briefing - though moved to the property owners' porch because of the rain. The instructor meeting is also usually a pot luck. I had been eating pretty poorly in New York (c'mon, could I say no to a NY deli pastrami sandwich? Or a couple of slices of pizza?) and so decided I'd stick to my Thermos of goop (quinoa, sauteed vegetables, and pecans mixed with Simple Greens soup) rather than be tempted by the pot luck items. I did wind up accepting some fresh fruit from the pot luck, and when someone shoved a platter of oatmeal cookies at me I couldn't resist taking one. I'm a sucker for cookies.

Instructor meeting and pot luck

After dinner, there was some (somewhat bourbon-fueled) conversation with one of the other instructors, a fellow who is quite intense while also being possessed of an affable Southern charm. This guy is former Special Forces and is also kayak racer - both groups which attract some intense people. Somehow the group got to talking relationships and he mentioned, as he always does, that he has three ex-wives, then veered into creepier territory saying his current goal was to date women his (30-ish) daughter's age. As the evening wore on this led into some amiable if unacceptably  misogynistic "guy talk" amongst the crowd, which I felt was particularly insensitive because one of the female instructors was still there. Anyway, from there somehow we went to Robert E. Lee, with the intense dude mounting a defense of Lee - that the fact that he resigned his U.S. Army commission and went to fight for the Confederacy shows that he was a man of honor. The idea that he was perhaps dishonorable for having taken up arms against his country to defend slavery he brushed aside with some non-sensical whataboutism, asking how could we criticize slavery while we condone the current situation of opioid abuse, which effectively makes slaves out of drug users. Umm, dude, did any of us say anything in favor of drug dealers? Anyway, it was a nice piece of misdirection when backed into a corner defending the people who fought for slavery.

Eventually Rob and I had enough of our Jim Crow friend, and we retired to the barebones but out of the rain motel.

Saturday, after a motel room breakfast of Via Brew coffee and a leftover muffin from my New York trip (from Connecticut Muffin - yum!), Rob and I headed back to the event location. We had taken just one car to the motel, and upon our return we found the parking situation to be dire, as everyone was being sent away to find parking along the road, in the driveways of neighbors who had agreed to let attendees park on their property, or at the marina. While the sodden ground merited parking restrictions, the rain had passed and a beautiful day was dawning. I grabbed my basic camping gear from my car and before morning classes started I had time to set up my tent, cot, and sleeping bag.

SK102 waterfront, Saturday morning

For most of SK102's history, Saturday ran as separate morning and afternoon sessions, with attendees able to choose whichever classes they wanted for each session. Since COVID, it's been streamlined - students are in either the novice track or the intermediate track, and the same group stays together with the same instructors all day. I was paired with my friend Béla, an experienced paddler and good teacher. The class size was small, only six students, and more importantly, everyone was gung-ho. In the morning we focused on strokes and general kayak information; the afternoon is spent in and out of the water learning how to rescue yourself and others. Usually a class will have at least one person who is whiny and unwilling to do the hard work of clamboring in and out of the water all afternoon, but these students were all into it! I guess anyone who actually showed up to do an outdoor activity on a rainy weekend had to have been motivated.

Béla does some on-land instruction before we hit the water

After classes were done for the day I went back to my tent where I grabbed a beer, peeled off my wetsuit, and just relaxed in the tent for a while. I think I may even have dozed off for a few minutes - but not for too long, because I still had a second shift to work.

Saturday's dinner is always provided by the event. In the old days when Brian ran it, he kept the cost as low as possible, and so dinner was the lowest quality from-the-box frozen burgers and similarly cheap sides. Since Catriona took over she's been upping the experience, and this year dinner was actually catered barbeque. I didn't eat any of the meat, but they had Impossible burgers for the vegetarians, and I also indulged in cole slaw, mac & cheese, and veggies. A fine dinner, 

Sunday's classes had already been cancelled (more rain was on the way and the owners and organizers want to get people off the property before it once again became a slick mud bath) and so a lot of people packed up and went home after dinner. As usual, I was on tap to be part of the so-called entertainment, so I hung around and performed with the other musically inclined instructors - though to a much smaller crowd than usual. Dubside even got up and sang some Greenlandic songs, accompanied by pre-recorded backup tracks he had created.

The Chesapeake Pickers Association performs

The rain was forecast to return during the night, so when the performance was done I was faced with a choice - stay over and pack out wet gear in the rain the following day, or load out in the dark and drive home somewhat late at night - but stay dry. I chose the latter. By the light of headlamp and lantern I broke down my cot, tent and sleeping back and, after loading out the music gear (thanks to Jeff W. for giving the PA a ride up the hill in the owners' golf cart!) I put the camping gear in the car and headed home. 

So, a very atypical SK102, but the organizers handled the rain-driven changes in plans well, I think our students got a lot out of the instruction, and despite the rain a good time was had by all.