Groningen to Amsterdam

I’ve been joined by my friend Hilary for the last few days of riding to Amsterdam. So look forward to some photos of something other than my bike!

OK, so after the last post I still had a day or two in Groningen, so here are some photos from that.

Hilary lives in the UK, and flew to Amsterdam hired a dutch style bike then hopped on a train to Groningen to meet me. At the train station I saw something really amazing. It was the bike parking there- two levels of bikes over this huge area. Later I saw another area that was 4 bikes high- stunning. This is the sort of bike storage we need at train stations in NZ! Imagine some of these at train stations in the Hutt Valley for instance!

So we rode out in a vaguely SW direction towards Amsterdam. Here’s an HDR shot of Hilary on a bike path. (I love the detail on the trees)

Hilary bought a new tent before coming over to the continent, so it was pretty entertaining watching her work out how to put it up! I guess I take for granted how used to the camping lifestyle I’ve become, and how advanced my campcraft is..
We stayed at a little “minicamping” place which only had a few spots, and was really cheap. There was a rave somewhere nearby, and we were lulled to sleep by the sound of dance music!

There have been quite a few miniature horses around the place, and we saw some baby ones (although the scale is difficult to judge).

Obviously a lot of the riding in the Netherlands is beside very flat rivers and canals.. I got this nice photo of the sun with the clouds.

Hilary was enjoying the riding too!

We stopped at a small town that had a market starting up. Here are some photos from it.

Then we hit a sort of inland coast (I think it’s tidal, maybe?), and followed the dykes towards the town of Urk. The wind turbines here seem to be concentrated on the coast, and along this part we rode past a 7km line of them!

Most of the day we were riding into a moderate cross- and head-wind. We stayed at a campground just outside of Urk, thinking the weather had turned for the better as the sky was clear when we climbed into the tents to go to sleep. In the middle of the night I woke to the soft patter of rain on a taut tent fly. I thought it might just be a shower like we’d had the night before, but it kept going, and would keep going until the early afternoon. So we packed up our wet tents and rode into the rain.. It was too heavy to have my camera out, so sorry, no photos. We stopped at a cafe along the way where I treated myself to a coffee and a toasted sandwich due to the rain.

We were going to camp another night, but decided it was better to push on the extra few kilometres to Amsterdam and the hostel. So it was a good ride in. All up over the 2.5 days it was 212km, not bad seeing as Hilary was on a 3-geared heavy dutch-styled bike and we had quite a bit of wind and rain!

Riding into Amsterdam consisted of a fight between my GPS routing and the cycling roadsigns pointing to town, but we got here eventually and checking into the hostel to dry out.
We also then treated ourselves to 5 euro pizza for dinner and went for a walk around town.

This morning (after gorging on the free breakfast), we heading into town again. Hilary went to see the Anne Frank house (and had to wait in the rain for half an hour). I haven’t read the book and didn’t want to stand in a line in the rain so went for a wander through town taking photos.
Lizard statues:

Bikes and a canal:

Another canal:

And another:

Bikes and canals, the better things Amsterdam is famous for:

Even Amsterdam has a Chinatown!

Hilary heads back to the UK tomorrow and I’ll probably do a walking tour (as the rain’s supposed to not be as bad then). On Wednesday I head south into what’s forecast to be up to 2 weeks of wet weather- fun times in a tent!

I’ll keep posting photos to SmugMug and might do another post before I go.
Also, if you’re enjoying my HDR photos I’ve created a “Smart Gallery” in SmugMug with them all, which you can see here.