Our destination for the next 16 days was the northwest corner of the Netherlands' most northwesterly province, North Holland.
It's common in English and many other languages to refer to the Netherlands as "Holland," but it's inaccurate as Holland was simply the most prosperous and best-known province of the various lands that came together during the 80 Years War to form the nation of the Netherlands. 150 years later Napoleon divided Holland into two parts, North Holland and South Holland, to better balance and control the various sections of the country, and the Dutch were happy to leave it in two parts after Napoleon left on his one-way cruise to St. Helena.
Our first destination was Alkmaar, which you can just about read on the map to the left depending on what size screen you're reading this on. It's only a few kilometers from Bergen, a later stay about which we'll say much more further on.
We first visited the Netherlands in 2013, when we were both comfortably old enough to be recipients of our Social Security old age pensions, but every return there since then has had the warm glow generally reserved for encounters with some special comfort food from one's childhood. This was no exception, and walking down the street one block from the train station our brains were screaming happily to us, "You're home again in Holland!"
Perhaps it's the human scale, perhaps it's the playfulness, but there's something about the architecture here that truly delights. Here are a few more examples from Alkmaar, ending with the city hall:
We found a brochure that talked about some of the buildings we walked by. One had a particularly interesting story. It was the early 1700s and a gentleman named Leeuw, Dutch for "lion," was having a hard time getting the building permit for his new town home. It seemed to take forever. When it finally came, he asked the stonemason to alter the bas relief sculpture of two lions on the façade of the building, so that the lions turned their bare butts to the town seal of Alkmaar carved in the center. And they're still there, atop the white building below.
If you ask an American to name a city in the Netherlands associated with cheese, you will almost certainly get Gouda as the reply, thanks to the popularity of Gouda cheese. It's so named not because it is or was made there, but rather because Gouda had one of the country's largest cheese markets. But here in the Netherlands there's another city almost equally associated with cheese, and that's Alkmaar, where we had just arrived. In fact, the Dutch Cheese Museum is located here, in what used to be the Waag, or official weigh-house where government officials certified the weight of cheese and other products. It was a Really Big Deal for a city to have the right to have a Waag, and the Ultimate Big Deal to have a major cheese market, as Gouda and Alkmaar did.
The museum itself was not overly informative, although the Dutch Cheese Girl adjacent to it was quite welcoming to Jeff. We did learn one interesting fact, though, that the average Dutch person eats 20 kg of cheese per year, which works out to a pound every 9 days. At first this rather staggered us, but a little research on the web reveals that this is not quite as extraordinary as it first seems, since the average for the US is a none-too-paltry 15 kg/yr., and the French and Greeks down the stuff at around 25 kg. per annum. In case you're wondering, we found one table that listed the Chinese average as 0.1 kg/yr., and about 2 for the Japanese.To take advantage of Alkmaar's association with cheese, the town has a recreation of the old cheese market, every Friday during tourist season. It's all for show, no cheese is actually bought or sold, but a ton of it (almost literally) gets moved about in those heavy wheels that fellows carry into and out of the Waag for a ceremonial weighing. For those whose salivary glands have gotten a workout watching all that cheese on the move, there are actual merchants nearby who are quite willing to satisfy your cravings, for a few euros. We joined the crowd, picking up a half kilo of 18-month aged Beemster.
And yes, we did get back on the bike. We put it together in a courtyard at our hotel and headed out for a 35 km spin through the countryside. Oh, did it feel good! We were quickly out of the city and into one of the many polders of North Holland, areas below sea level that have been turned into lush farmland by the more-or-less continual pumping of water uphill into canals that take any excess to the ocean. The pumping used to be done by windmills, but today it is entirely by electric pump. And where does the electricity come from? Well some of it comes from wind, so in a sense the water is still being pumped by air power, just a tad less directly.
Many old windmills remain, though the larger ones, like those in the fourth photo below, were generally for the milling of grain, extraction of plant oils, crushing of paint pigments and the like, not the moving of water.
There is virtually no urban sprawl in the Netherlands. Once one leaves the city, it's countryside. Plain and simple. Every few kilometers one comes to a small village of a few dozen to even a hundred homes, then it's on back to the countryside. These villages often surprise with attractive and substantial buildings, such as this one in Grootschermer built in 1652. A bit later we took a photo as we prepared to descend from our route atop a major dike down to a secondary dike between the twin rows of trees ahead of us, and alongside an even smaller village serving this part of the polder. But civilization is not far away -- that line of houses in the distance is the eastern edge of Alkmaar.
After two days of rides like this, the weather forecast predicted a strong SW wind all day. Hmmm, can we do something with this other than grumble for half of a round-trip bike ride? Aha! We'll ride 55 km to the NNE, from Alkmaar to Den Helder, and take a train back to Alkmaar! It cost 24 euros for us and the bike, and it was sooooo worth it to have an all-day 15-20 mph (24-32 kph) tailwind.
Much of the trip was close to the North Sea, in the extensive dunes that are part of a narrow national park protecting them from development and damage. To keep domestic animals out and some of the larger wild ones in, they have occasional roosters, pronounced 'roasters,' which look like a smaller version of our cattle guards. They look to the Dutch like what meat used to be roasted on, hence the name. They look dangerous, but are actually easy to bike across since the bars are fairly close to one another, just wide enough to make a sheep or deer think twice about crossing one.
Although we were close to the ocean, for much of the way it was out of sight and sound. We stopped at one spot where the path almost crossed over the dunes before deciding not to, and returning to the back side of the dune and the adjacent lush polder. The first shot looks south, the second north with a light house on top of the dune. No need for a man-made dike here, with a dune this size protecting the land from the North Sea!
But eventually our route did make it across the tall dunes to where we could survey the North Sea. There was a popular beach here, and in typical Dutch fashion the car parking was almost a km away, while the bike parking (all those wooden bars to lean bikes against) was relatively close to the beach. That's not a roadway in the center of the photo, by the way, but rather national long-distance bike route 1. Have we said yet how unbelievably good the bike facilities are in the Netherlands?
It was windy and in the 60s for temperature, so that might be keeping the crowd size down a little, but quite frankly these beaches never get crowded. And, this being the Netherlands, no one objects when someone decides to bike down the beach.
At last it was time to head north with our panniers full of clothes, to a rendezvous with tandem friends Nico and Marga. Our meeting spot was a 2 BR vacation home on the island of Texel, off the coast of North Holland (marked on the map up near the start of today's blog), and we took two days to ride up there. Along the way we crossed a canal on a ferry pulled by cables. We waited 5 minutes for it to come across to pick us up as a trio of boats went by on the canal, none of them eager to run into the cable. We next stopped to admire yet another polder, then a particularly colorful garden, and finally a handsome home-with-attached-barn that now finds itself in the heart of the city of Schagen, and itself turned into a museum of life here in the old days.
We reached the top of the mainland and the North Sea, where the Dutch are taking no chances with the ocean and have protected the sea dike with a layer of asphalt. While we could have riden on it, we preferred the regular bike path behind the dike, even though it lacked a view. As we got into Den Helder the bike path itself went up onto the dike, so of course we followed. And then it appeared that the Texel ferry was joining us in climbing onto the dike!
Our next four nights were spent very happily in that 2 BR vacation apartment with Nico and Marga. We met them 2 years ago when we stopped to talk with them on the Moselle River in Germany. A few weeks later they drove to Leiden Netherlands, which we had reached by then, and joined us for a 50 km ride. Then last year we took them up on an offer to stay with them, and we spent three nights at their house and had two nice bike tours of the Hoeksche Waard, the area where they live south of Rotterdam. We were now ready to tackle even more time together.
Nico lost his vision over a period of years in his childhood due to a progressive disease, but he stays quite active on the tandem with his wife and tandem partner Marga. Marga also bikes to work, about 15 km each way, but that raises no eyebrows in the Netherlands where that's pretty much a normal thing to do.
Though it was a bit windy every day and rained for a short while on two of our four days, we still managed to bike all over Texel Island, all the way up to the bright red lighthouse at the far end of the island. It is such a popular destination for the bike-crazy Dutch that the more popular bike trails were busier than in most Dutch cities we've visited, and that's truly saying something. But the countryside was anything but crowded, as you can see.
One of our rides took us to a most unexpected site, a memorial to those who died in the last battle in Europe of WW II, a battle that extended 13 days after the end of the war everywhere else. The story was an odd one. In 1941 and '42 the Germans captured large numbers of Georgian troops fighting on behalf of the Soviet Union, of which Georgia was a part. Given the choice of starvation in a POW camp or of changing sides and becoming allies of the Nazis, many chose the latter. Many were sent to the occupied Netherlands to serve as front line troops should the Allies try to attack from the North Sea.
In February 1945 800 of them were moved to Texel, where they joined 400 German soldiers. Then came word they were to be shipped eastward to fight against Russian troops headed towards Berlin. The Georgians knew that this was a death sentence, for anyone who survived the fight would be executed as a traitor upon capture or surrender. So on the night of April 6, 1945, they attacked their German colleagues, killing most of them. But not all. Which was a problem, because German reinforcements shortly arrived, and all hell broke out. It only ended six weeks later, a full 13 days after V-E Day, when Canadian troops arrived and let the Germans know that any further shooting would be treated as cold-blooded murder, not warfare. Unfortunately for the island, 100 Texel Islanders had died in the crossfire, along with hundreds of Germans and Georgians. The memorial itself was this quiet field surrounded by trees, where 476 Georgian soldiers lie buried in a common grave.
But this sad chapter in history was the only unpleasantness we encountered. We rode many happy kilometers on bike trails that both criss-cross the island and also go up and down each side. But the trails are rarely in sight of the North Sea since there are dunes in the way, dunes that the government has succeeded in keeping natural. So to get a view we took a 2-km walk from our apartment past sand dunes and heathlands to the shore, where some horses were "taking the waters."
While waiting out a drizzly morning we drove over to the east side of the island, where dunes do not naturally occur. So the Dutch have built extensive dikes, and are now in the process of raising these dikes another two meters. You can see how they do it: pile up a lot of sand, run heavy equipment over it to pack it down, then cap it with a few inches of asphalt. While we were up there we also took a photo of one of the many bicycle rental shops on Texel Island, with business down at the moment due to the drizzle. But are they ever ready for when would-be bikers arrive! We've heard that Texel is one of the most popular places to bike in the Netherlands, and our trip there amply confirmed this.
Our four nights on Texel flew by, but we were not done vacationing with Nico and Marga. They had driven up to Texel, and volunteered to carry our panniers so we could ride 50 km south to the city of Bergen, where we and they had another four nights booked, this time in adjacent hotel rooms. The forecast looked challenging, with another strong SW wind, so our game plan was to tough out this headwind 8 km to the ferry and then the 2 km beyond to the train station in Den Helder. The train would then take us to Alkmaar from which it would be a short ride to Bergen. However we had gotten stronger again after a week back on the bike, and also smarter about finding a route where there might be a little more shelter from the wind, and we did in fact ride the whole way to Bergen. We were a tad tired, but very pleased with ourselves.
Bergen is a charming place, a town 5 km from the North Sea that draws in tourists by the bucketload. There are numerous hotels and restaurants, and multiple bike routes taking you either to the sea or on routes parallel to it through the dunes. We'll start with four shots in the dunes, which run the gamut from sandy to grassy to heather-bedecked to forested.
We came out to the North Sea twice, in the towns of Bergen aan Zee and Egmond aan Zee. At the former we enjoyed kofie and appeltaarts at the sort of place one sees all over the Netherlands, a café with an outdoor dining terrace. In Egmond we actually got down to and, in the case of Nico and Marga, into the water. It was cold, though you can't tell that from these two tough Dutch folks.
The seashells were quite colorful here, and gave us this chance to post our first catch-and-release shell photo in the Redtandem Blog since we uploaded a half dozen in New Zealand over 9 years ago.
Back on the bike trail, we kept encountering the most interesting bikes. These rental tandems are especially built for adult and child riding, as the person in the short seat can coast while mom or dad pedals in the back, and the steering is done from the back by means of a shaft that you can see on the right side of the bike. As for the Klompen shoe bike . . . ? Pretty funny!
Before leaving the dunes, let's revisit the heather once more. It was in full bloom in late August, such a lovely sight!
Our second 4-day adventure with Nico and Marga seemed to zip by just as fast as the first one. One main difference was restaurant dinners in place of home-cooking in our kitchen in Texel. But in both places we found time for several games of our favorite card game, "Oh Hell." So how exactly do you play a card game with a blind guy? If that guy is Nico, the answer is "Very, very carefully." We used a deck of cards he's marked with braille. Each time someone played a card, he or she announced what it was, such as "Ace of hearts." Nico is such a sharp character, he managed his cards better than the rest of us and won 2/3 of all the games we played.
At last it was time to say goodbye. All four of us rode 22 km to De Rijp, a small town SE of Bergen. Nico and Marga then turned back to Bergen and their drive home by car to the Hoeksche Waard, while we continued on to Monnickendam and other points to the south. But our separation from our friends will be a short one. We'll tell you next time all about our 5-night, 6-day ride through five of the Netherlands' provinces, ending in . . . Hoeksche Waard, at Nico and Marga's house for our final stop in Europe this summer.
