Exploring North Holland with Friends

Welcome to the 2018 edition of the Redtandem travel blog.  This year is starting out with a new twist.  Our tandem friends from Seattle, Steve and Janet, are joining us for the first 16 days.  Today's blog entry will cover the start of our trip and our wandering about the Province of North Holland, to be followed in a few days (when we find time to write it) by entries about the rest of our joint trip in South Holland and Utrecht Provinces.  When we are just below the city of Almere we will head east and Steve and Janet will head west to reunite with their bike luggage, disassemble their tandem, and fly back to Seattle.  We, on the other hand, will head on to Germany and later back to the Netherlands.  Yes, dear readers, we have another full summer of biking to report on in coming blog entries.

We started our trip in Alkmaar after a long flight over via Reykjavik and Schiphol airport outside Amsterdam.  Alkmaar is a 35-minute train ride from Amsterdam, and like a good Dutch train station has facilities for bike/train commuters that boggle the imagination.  This ramp, only part of which we could capture in one shot, holds hundreds of bikes, perhaps even a thousand!  It's a weekday, so as you can see a LOT of folks do a  bike/train commute!

We happened to have arrived on the weekend of an annual festival, and the downtown area on Saturday morning was full of interesting characters and gadgets, including a reconstruction of a medieval hoist with which a young girl plus grandpa were raising brother and dad, then lowering them to just above the water.  Of course in the old days, this was how they loaded ships that plied the canals into and out of town.

Both tandem teams showed up wearing the team socks for ETC, the Evergreen Tandem Club in Seattle.  We warmed up with an easy ride into the polders east of Alkmaar, passing several knoopunten that the Dutch use as way-points in their 20,000-mile-long network of bike routes.  And, of course, there are windmills out there.  This is the Netherlands, after all!

After one night in Alkmaar to recover from jet lag and to reassemble our two tandems from jumbles of metal parts into working bikes, we moved on to nearby Schoorl.  This tiny community sits right next to the largest dune complex in the Netherlands, and by renting a vacation home for four nights we got to explore for three full days, two by bike and one on foot.

We'll start with a closer-in beach view, where you can see both the natural dunes and the absence of crowds, despite this being a Saturday with temperatures around 68 F / 20 C.  Our next two shots were taken  from a man-made "observation dune" a dozen km to the north.  The beach to the north has a single line of natural dunes supplemented in places by a man-made dike.  Looking south (the third and fourth photos) one can see the Schoorl dune complex in the distance, dark green from the many pine trees and small vegetation that keep it in place.  It stretches about 5 km east-west and a little more north-south, with some dunes rising as high as 55m / 180 feet above sea level.

Take another look at the building in the third photo.  It's a beach pavilion, of which there are hundreds lining the North Sea coast.  They provide meals, coffee, beer, and appeltaarten, slices of apple pie that the Dutch do so very well.  A hundred years ago the beach was hundreds of meters/yards wider, and there was even a small fishing village at the edge of the sea, to the right of where the pavilion is now.  Beach erosion moved so much of it away that the locals built the sea dike you see as a ridge across the center of the fourth photo.  They worried that a big storm might breach it, so in response the beach was rebuilt with millions of tons of dredged sand, and this time planted with grasses that will hopefully keep it anchored.  Such is life in the Netherlands, with its constant battle with the forces of moving water.

Back in the dunes, the biking is great.  So unlike much of the Netherlands, with deep woods and undulating paths.  In a few spots the trails go by tall dunes.  Sorry, this photo doesn't do justice to just how tall the dune behind our tandem is.  Suffice to say, it would be very hard to walk up.  Nearby is another one that backs up to the center of Schoorl which large numbers of kids and their parents do clamber up, so much so that the town every so often has to scoop up the sand that has been pushed down by all those tiny feet, load it into a dump truck, and haul it around the back way to redeposit it at the top.

On our walking day we began by passing some interesting houses close by our rental place, then two fellows who were retrimming some thatched roofs.  A thatch roof, they told us, might last up to 20 years, but it has to be trimmed every 5 years or so to remove the weathered outer portion of the thatch, with bits of new thatch pushed into any spot that needs a little thickening-up.  This job was the first retrimming of the roof they were working on.

Entering the town we passed the town hall.  Not too surprisingly, it is the smallest one in the Netherlands.  On the edge of the town is an Outdoors Center that has marked numerous trails through the dunes, all color-coded.  We followed the yellow trail up some significant climbs but also many flat sections on ridgetops.  The last photo looks northeast toward the typically flat polder land that stretches many, many kilometers into the distance.  Our perch is atop one of the tallest dunes, roughly 175 feet above sea level, whereas much of the land below is actually a few feet below sea level.  Another one of those Dutch things.  Not for nothing is it called the Netherlands, the "low lands."

It was now time to hit the trail.  Our route took us 50 km / 32 mi. south through the dunes of the national park that protects the seashore.  We were not alone.  Along with numerous cyclists and occasional hikers, we also had Scottish bulls for company.  They are living the good life as "wild animals," meaning not destined for anyone's dinner table, but as docile as dinner guests.

We had a major obstacle to get by, the massive North Sea Canal.  This was dug in the mid-1800s by human and animal effort, and it connects Amsterdam with the sea.  At the mouth of the canal is a dam and a set of locks.  Unlike any other seaside locks we've ever heard of, these locks lift boats UP to the sea, since the normal height of the canal is lower than the ocean except at low tide.  We had wanted to take the bike route across the locks, as we did 2 years ago, but it is closed as they are reconstructing them to create the largest sea locks in the world.

From the north side we could watch large ships entering and headed to the locks 2 km inland.  Behind us on the north side was one of the largest industrial complexes we've ever encountered in the Netherlands.  Here are views from the west and later from our ferry, looking north.

Our own ferry was a modest one but it did the job of crossing the canal and taking us into the city of IJmuiden quite quickly.  En route we got a good view of part of the port and of the substantially larger ferry that crosses each day to Newcastle in the UK.  On the right side of that view is an island with a fort.  It dates to the 19th century, but the Germans were happy to take it over during WW II and make it part of the "Atlantic Wall" defenses against an Allied invasion.  At least the soldiers manning it never had to face gunfire, though it must have been an awfully boring 4 years waiting for an invasion than never came to this part of the coast.

A castle ruins greeted us on the outskirts of Haarlem, dating back perhaps to when this view of the city was drawn, centuries back.  The "Great Church," aka the Church of Saint Bavo, still dominates the Haarlem skyline today as it did then.

Of course, it is more impressive still up close.  Note the shops clustered about the church, leasing space along the church walls which the church was happy to accept rent for.  Somehow, having a gelato shop attached to the church walls has always seemed a bit profane to our North American sensibilities, but apparently not to the folks in this part of the world.

Inside there is so much to see both up, down and at eye level.  The floor is pretty much all gravestones, most of them unreadable after centuries of being walked upon.  The practice only ended in the early 1800s.  Since it required a substantial donation to the church to get one of these preferred eternal resting spots, legend has it that the term "the stinking rich" had its origins in this practice.

And the box?  It's an ancient safe that once held the legal documents that awarded city rights to Haarlem.  Note three places for locks.  Three different locks with three different keys would be held by three different city officials, an early attempt at creating a "fail safe" way of preventing these precious documents from leaving town.

The church is full of surprises.  Some of it we found explanations for, such as the stonework depicting the church official known as the Dog Whipper, who kept dogs who wandered into church in line.  The ships were involved in a famous naval battle.  The rest?  Who knows!  Perhaps the fellow to the right could tell us if he weren't so busy biting that stone column.

We had a wonderful seafood dinner the first of our two nights in Haarlem.  Steve had so many mussels he started giving them away.  Jeff was happy to accept, even after finishing off his prawn dish and his share of a shared plate of calamari.  Louise and Janet had monkfish salads and quite enjoyed them.  It was just the ticket to prepare us for a day of off-the-bike walking through town the next day.

We had two destinations.  The first was actually a series of points of interest.  We had found a walking tour of historic hofjes, meaning "little courtyards" but translated as almshouses.   These were founded by wealthy individuals as homes for elderly widows and spinsters.  We even were directed to one that was constructed a few years ago, but as "senior housing," which is exactly what the others have morphed into.  In the middle ages they would have been rent-free, but the social security network in the Netherlands is robust enough that today's inhabitants pay rent.  The last photo is of an equivalent for men, not in the shape of a courtyard but of a row of townhouses.  However there was a housemother of sorts who cooked for the gentlemen, who were generally strangers to the art of preparing food for themselves.

Our next destination was the Frans Hals Museum, though we got distracted en route by some of the more outstanding architecture along the way.

Frans Hals is renowned as one of the best artists in capturing smiles on his subjects.  He certainly did that with these first two paintings, the first called The Fisher Boy and the second, The Innkeeper.  The third painting is by another artist, Pieter Roestraten, and The Dissolute Kitchen Maid has more of a leer than a smile on the gentleman's face.

Hals is also famous for group portraits, a source of rich commissions for artists in the Golden Age of Dutch painting.  We'll end with two, first a closeup of part of an enormous canvas, Banquet of the Civic Guard of Saint George.  It depicts the farewell dinner ending the three-year commitments of a group of local militia, and it raised the bar for Dutch artists of the time by taking what could be a static collection of portraits and turning it into a dynamic capture of men doing more than staring at the artist.  The second group painting is more static, but Hals has at least captured a variety of expressions in this gathering of the women directors (regents) of one of the homes for old men in Haarlem.

In our next blog entry we'll be headed further south into the Province of South Holland and the cities of Leiden, Scheveningen, The Hague and Delft.