Biking in East Anglia

As explained also in an earlier blog entry, an American who enters the Schengen Zone may spend only 90 out of the next 180 days there.  Most of the EU is in the Schengen Zone, but luckily not the UK, so we headed there in late July to stop the Schengen clock for 19 days.

 

Our room on the Stena ferry was "cosy," as in "tiny as a postage stamp but comfortable if you didn't swing your arms too wide."  Plus we were going to British time, meaning we gained an hour.  We headed upstairs to enjoy a full moon and the last views of Holland to the east, then beaches and dunes stretching endlessly off to the north at the mouth of the Rhine, and finally sunset.  England was now just 6 1/2 hours beyond the end of that lengthy jetty.

When the loudspeaker in our stateroom woke us from sound sleep at 5:30 am, however, it didn't feel like we had crossed the Channel or "gained" a minute, let alone an hour.  When your optic nerve transmits "5:30" to your brain, no other part of that organ is strong enough to say it "feels" like anything other than "Hey, this is waaaay too early to function!"

But function we did, sort of, and 75 minutes later we rode off the ferry and through British customs onto our first British road.  "Dang" (or something like that), our rear view mirrors are on the wrong side!  Louise's is designed to be left-side or right-side, but not Jeff's, so we stopped to move hers and jerry-rig his to give him a view back, kind of sort of, but only if he leaned just so, and didn't expect to see back more than fifty feet.  Like the little engine that went down the track saying "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can," Jeff steered down the road saying his own mantra quietly to himself: "you're in bloody Britain, bike on the left; you're in bloody Britain, bike on the left; you're in bloody Britain, bike on the left."   We explored the harbor town of Harwich, tracked down an ATM and armed ourselves with some British pounds, then headed west toward Dedham, our first destination.

We had a mostly quiet route Jeff had found mapped out on the Internet, but there were a few stretches of a mile here, two miles there on busier roads.  Narrow busy roads, with Jeff busy reciting his verses and counting down the tenths of a mile on the bike computer, waiting 'til we came to a turn into one of those quiet roads.  Then, "oh, no!" from Louise followed by a plastic-y bouncing sound.  "Stop, the mirror fell off!" 

We pulled left to the edge of the road and looked back at a line of five cars that had been trailing us, and at our mirror in the middle of the lane.  A car straddled it.  Whew.  Another.  Whew again.  A third.  Yeah, there's hope!  Nope.  Number four nailed it with his left tires, thinking he was doing a good thing by passing us with extra room.  Number five completed the flattening.  Memo to selves: search for "bike shop" along our route on  Google Maps tonight.

Somehow we survived and were rewarded a few miles out of Dedham with our first grand view of "Constable Country."  Across the valley is East Bergholt, where John Constable grew up, and on the left (just right of the large tree) you can see the square tower of Dedham Church, which appears in a dozen or more of his paintings. After a nice coast downhill, we found ourselves in town and in front of that very church, then soon after in our 16th century lodging for three nights, Dedham Hall, built in the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth.

 

Having been spoiled for 6 weeks by Holland's and Belgium's fabulous bike infrastructure, we had a hard adjustment to England's narrow roads and almost total absence of bike paths or even bike lanes.  But in the next two days we began to see that England is as far ahead in walking facilities as the Low Countries are in biking.  From Dedham Hall we could walk straight down paths that were public ways even before that manor house was built, and have remained so ever since.  Here are just a few of the paths that we walked, the first of many that we discovered criss-crossing every village we visited in East Anglia.  Most had either stiles or gates to keep the cows or sheep where they belonged while letting people pass through, while others went right through fields of crops (rutabagas, we think).

 

One of these walks brought us to East Bergholt, where John Constable was born down the street from this ancient church, and to Flatford Mill where Constable's father ran a mill. 

 

The buildings and scenery all around the mill are the setting for some of Constable's most famous paintings, and an exhibit by the National Trust, which now owns several acres and most of the buildings here, helped us find and photograph where some of these were painted, such as Boatbuilding from 1814,

 

Scene on a Navigable River in 1817,

 

The White Horse in 1819,

 

The Hay Wain in 1821,

 

and View on the Stour in 1822.  The bridge is new -- wooden bridges rarely last 200 years -- and some trees have grown up to the left, but even in Constable's day the view in the painting was not what the eye would have perceived there.  The church was further to the left, out of view, and rather small as it is four miles away (we had to use the telephoto lens aimed 30 degrees to the left to find it from a nearby viewpoint), so Constable moved it, as it were, some two miles to where he preferred it were located.  He also thought that Willy Lott's roof was too long in The Hay Wain, and you might have noticed above that he shortened it up a bit.  Imagine that, all this without Photo Shop!

 

After two days of walking we hopped on the bike again.  Louise suggested a new way of remounting Jeff's rear view mirror which worked better, and at lunch time we found a bike shop where we were able to get Louise a new mirror.  These made us feel a bit safer, plus provided a visual reminder to us to bike on the left side of the road, since the mirrors were now on the right side looking back at cars about to pass us.

About a fourth of the way on this 43-mile day we reached National Bike Route 1, and followed it for the next two days.  This is one of a few dozen cycling routes that have been mapped out to string together low-traffic routes around the country.  Once we got the hang of it plus some good maps, these made the biking better, and route-finding much simpler, since we now had a bright blue icon to search for on direction signs at intersections.  Nonetheless, we were still on narrow roads, just ones with very light traffic on them.

A short digression:  Henry VIII named his son Edward VI as his successor, with Henry's daughters Mary and Elizabeth as next in line if Edward didn't produce an heir.  As Edward lay dying, heirless, he tried to change things about and named Lady Jane Grey, a more distant Tudor relative, as the next queen.  Mary thought otherwise, and gathered troops at Framlingham Castle, prepared to fight her way to London to claim her throne.  Parliament knew how to count soldiers, and threw its support to Mary.  Framlingham Castle is still there, but that moment in 1553 was its high point and its last moment of military significance.  From the outside or from atop its ramparts, it's an imposing sight with impressive views.

 

The castle had a helpful sketch showing what it might have looked like in the 1200s.  By the 1700s the church (to the right) and manor house (to the left) had been dismantled, leaving just a few tell-tale marks on the castle wall that they had once been there.  Meanwhile a self-made tycoon bought the place and provided funds for a poor house to be constructed within the castle, with provisions that youngsters living there be provided with useful trade skills.  Historians think that handsome carvings over the doors and windows of the poorhouse were recycled from the former manor house.

 

 

We spent a few wonderful hours exploring Framlingham Castle and learning how theses seemingly solid structures constantly changed with the times.  Before leaving we saw one of the newer innovations there, Boot Camp Day for kids, where a gruff sergeant shouted out encouragements like "move along, my granny can do that faster than you're doing it!"  The kids seemed to love it.

 

As we left some congestion around Ipswich, National Bike Route 1 did an increasingly good job of putting us on quiet back roads.  At one point it directed us down what appeared to be a cul de sac, where there was a private railway crossing just for pedestrians and bikes.  We Stopped, Looked and Listened, and by golly we Heard and Saw!  A train whooshed into view with remarkably little warning, swooped by at 50 mph and swiftly disappeared round a bend in the tracks.

 

In Norwich we visited the first of two great cathedrals.  We joined a tour and were astonished to discover that this enormous church was not open to the townspeople of Norwich for centuries, as it was built just for the use of the attached monastery.  The first two photos are from, and in, the large cloister attached to the south side of the cathedral, where monks once walked about, reciting their daily prayers.

 Today the church is famous not only for its size and beauty, but also for little ceiling decorations called "bosses" which range from a depiction of Jesus with a soldier holding the nails he will be crucified with to a monkish musical group, then from a thief getting caught stealing a woman's laundry to some sort of medieval monster.  There are over a hundred of these, so go check them out yourselves some day and pick out your favorites.

We had booked three nights in Wroxham in an area known as The Broads, famous for tidal rivers with broad sections in former peat bogs.  Alas, it was quite windy both days we had planned for canoeing or biking, so instead we took a train each day 30 minutes north to Sheringham, on the Norfolk coast.  Good call, as the info center provided us with a detailed map that led us both days on some great walks.

 

Two days earlier we had photographed this stunning flint house in Beccles.  Flint must be quite abundant in these parts, as we saw many homes throughout East Anglia made from it, but none as stunning as this one.  It was made with cut flint, in this case almost perfect hemispheres with the flat surfaces facing outward.  A similar style we encountered was with cut flint, but with irregularly cut surfaces facing outward.

 

That same earlier day we had also biked past the ruins of a church from Norman times that illustrated the third and most common style we saw, entire structures made of uncut round flint stones held together with a minimum of cement.

 

 

Now, on our walk through the village of Upper Sheringham, it wasn't just an entire house, but rather an entire village made of flint:  dozens and dozens of homes, shops, even the town church and a pool that served as the town reservoir until the mid-19th century, everything made of flint, with just a touch of brick at the corners.

 

Our two walks from Sheringham also took us down paths tucked between hedge rows, past a country manor once owned by the local gentry, and on to sweeping vistas.  A steam train chugged by, full of tourists, a windmill out their right-hand windows.  We walked a mile further to one of the steam train's railway stations and its much needed WC, which was decorated with old train posters.

 

Then it was down to the sea coast, quite pebbly and rocky except where the waves landed all day, pulverizing these into fine sand.  Since it was close to high tide, there wasn't much sand to be seen.

 

The second day we started with a cliff walk high above the beach, then headed inland past a monastery closed down by King Henry VIII in 1538, along with almost every other monastery and convent in the land as Henry tried to rein in the power of the Church -- and raise a bit of cash by selling off what he seized.  As also occurred virtually everywhere in England, the church was torn down to be sure the monks had nothing to come back to, should they have a mind to defy the king.  The ruins were certainly atmospheric, and gave us a good chance to show you the flint construction up close.

 

Our next stop was at Gressenhall Museum of Norfolk Life, housed in an actual Victorian workhouse, 1 of only 3 left in England.  The concept was to provide the destitute with enough to live on, but just barely, so that no one would be tempted to stay for long.  You'd think this menu would do the trick of getting folks out the door, but given their minimal skills and the ruthless capitalism of the times, some had no choice but to stay there for years, men on one side of that wall in one dormitory, women on the other in another, visits once a week on Sunday afternoon, kids in dormitory rooms of their own.  One young visitor modeled the workhouse attire for us. 

 

To maximize occupancy in the dormitories, they installed these trapezoidal beds.  To keep idle hands from doing the devil's business, they provided work, such as in the laundry with these washers and drying racks.  It was all quite Dickensian.

 

Our next two nights were at the Ostrich Inn in Castle Acre, a pub that boasts that Oliver Cromwell's grandmum used to come in for a pint and perhaps advice on how to turn young Ollie into a regicidal religious extremist.  Seems like she succeeded.  We tried a pint and it only turned us into mellower versions of ourselves.  Maybe we needed a few more.  When we went to the toilet each night, it felt like we had to go uphill in our room to get there.  No, it wasn't that fine beer, it was the sign of a good Tudor inn.  Hey, you'd sag just as much as our public house if you were as old as this place!

Castle Acre was our favorite town in East Anglia, partly for the good food and charm of the Ostrich Inn, but mainly because it had not one, nor two, but three ancient sites, along with being an attractive little town.

 

Right in the center of town is an old entrance to the town, known as the Bailey Gate.

 

Two blocks away is what's left of the castle, already in ruins in the 1300s.  A sign shows it in better days.  The moats are quite dry these days, full of wildflowers.  The third photo looks down on the lower part of the castle from a point in front of the manor house in the upper area.

The real jewel of Castle Acre, however is the Priory, the best-preserved Cluniac monastery in England.  The Cluniacs were sort of the Lexus brand of monasteries, renowned for their elegance and style.  Just check out that Reredorter!  They somehow found a letter written home to mom and dad by a young monk, who just gushed about how they didn't have a hole in the ground, his monastery had this wonderful two story building, and when you went the water just washed it all away!  They haven't yet come across any letters from the folks living downstream.  Oh, did we mention, this place once had 35 well-fed monks living here?

 

But we digress.  The front facade is still mostly standing, thanks to the fact that it attaches to the chief abbot's residence, which was rented out as a farmer's residence after the fall of the monastery.  Climb up to the second floor and you can see that the chief abbot had pretty nice digs. Go through the main entrance to the church and look back at the tower -- you can still see a narrow passageway on the third floor.  Wander around back and still more fanciful piles of stones are the skeletons of the chapter house, the dormitory, the refectory and so on.

 

We had noticed in Castle Acre that there was a nearby river, the Nar.  We saw on our map that we were going through a place called "Narford."  Sounds like Stanford, Milford, or a thousand other towns and cities in the U.S.  Ah, but we weren't in the U.S., and it wasn't until saw Narford that a little light turned on, as it were, over our heads.  Oh, THAT kind of "ford!"  Thank goodness for the little bridge.

 

By this time we were off the National Bike Routes, but we had learned how to interpret British maps to find quiet country roads.  We found both direct and circumstantial evidence that we were not the only non-motorized users of these roads.  Many were indeed sheltered by thick hedgerows, quite helpful when the wind got ornery.  But we also were rewarded with vistas from time to time.  We had heard before coming here that East Anglia was great for biking because it was the flattest part of England.  That may well be a true statement, but we were frequently reminded by the land itself that it is a relative comparison.  East Anglia is decidedly not flat.

En route to Ely we planned to visit one of England's stately homes now open to tourists, when we chanced upon one that is clearly still private.  Hmmm, didn't Darcy from Pride and Prejudice have a place up in Norfolk, where we now were?  There was no mailbox with a name on it to say otherwise.  In due time we got to our true destination, Oxburgh Hall in the town of Oxborough, and it was a stately home indeed.  A stately moated home, in fact, with a rather imposing entrance across that moat through the tower and into the inner courtyard.

 

The National Trust now owns it, having just barely saved it from being torn down to create tract housing.  The Bedingfied family still have the right to stay there in one section of this rather large place, which their ancestors moved into in 1582.

In exchange for a few pounds sterling we got to poke about the place, see the sort of stuff the British nobility tended to accumulate over the centuries, and to walk through one room that made us think that Lord Grantham and Lady Mary might walk in at any moment to try some of that pot of tea and plate of crumpets.

 The upper part of the house was interesting both for the views and for the king's and queen's rooms.  Yes, they did have a Royal stay here once, but we seem to have forgotten which one.  The king's room is the one with all the sharp, pointy things decorating it, of course.

 

The most remarkable feature of the house, however, is the "priest's hole."  The Bedingfields never gave up their Catholic faith when England became a Protestant country, and being a Catholic priest there see-sawed between being a deportable offense and a capital one.  Several dozen noble families around England like the Bedingfields shielded Catholic priests, but even they could not openly defy the law so they evaded it by having secret places the priest could hide in when the law came by for a spot of tea and an unannounced inspection.  This one was in the back of a closet, and is apparently one of the best priest holes to survive and be open to the public.  Thanks to their Catholic connections, the Bedingfieds also came into possession of some very fine needlework done by Queen Elizabeth's feisty Catholic challenger, Mary Queen of Scots, during Mary's long captivity.

 

From crypto-Catholicism we moved on to soaring Anglicanism as we visited a second great cathedral, Ely.  Its finest feature is the Octagon, a domed structure built in 1532 over the crossing, i.e. the place where the long E-W axis of the church intersects the shorter N-S arms.  But Ely had many smaller charms, like these stone carvings where monks once entered the church from their attached cloister.

 

It was now our twelfth day of cycling in England.  We did a mile or two on a dike path near Ely, then headed back into the rolling hills through Suffolk past a charming country house.  We reached the town of Long Melford about 4 p.m.  Waiting for us in a rented cottage were Lin and Bernard, a British tandem couple we met in 2009 in New Zealand.  We'll tell you about our week with them, exploring this corner of Suffolk on foot and on tandems, in our next blog entry.

Bicycling in the Netherlands: an Amazing Experience

We've now cycled 6 weeks since entering the Netherlands, travelling 1250 km there and 150 km in adjacent parts of Belgium, visiting 9 of the 12 provinces of the Netherlands plus 1 (Antwerpen) of Belgium.  Since Holland is roughly 310 km N-S and 265 km E-W, we've had a fairly good look at the place.

And this is an amazing place to bike.  It is attractive and historic and friendly, and the bike facilities are beyond belief.  Even some of the public art is bike-oriented!  Where else could you find twin drawbridges where one span is for cars and a separate one dedicated solely to bicycles and pedestrians?  Or a ferry primarily, sometimes even exclusively, for cyclists?

There are a lot of bicycles and a lot of cyclists in Holland and Belgium.  We rarely biked anywhere without seeing others on their bikes going to work, school or shopping, almost never with lycra or helmets to be seen.  A remarkably large percentage appeared to be in thier 60s and older -- in fact, a dream start to retirement in Holland is considered a long bike trip!

Almost every day we saw long-distance cyclists like ourselves, with tell-tale bulging panniers, and on weekends the 20- and 30-something crowd, usually in bunches, usually single-sex and often but not always male, almost always in what we think of as full cycling regalia of helmet and bright-colored bike clothes.

 

And everywhere a bike could be parked, they are parked.  In amazing numbers.  Sometimes even underground, where our tandem rested awhile under the Groningen Public Library (this is just one of three lanes of parked bikes there), or double-stacked at train stations.

 

 

Lodging has been easy to find and book, and only once have we stayed somewhere where there wasn't a restaurant on the premises or a few doors down the street.  This was a small town where we rolde all of 2.5 km to the adjoining small town, which had a Chinese-Indonesian restaurant.  We al;so found universally comfortable lodging at an average cost of  €85 ($115) per night.  With only one or two exceptions, this included and all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet that always had meat and cheese, almost always eggs and fruit, plus much more.  No "continental" breakfasts here!

Now, let's share our observations about the biking.

 

 

Bike Paths

Almost 2/3 of our miles in Holland have been on bike paths, virtually all the rest on relatively quiet country roads.  Trails come in two main flavors, either next to a road, or not.  A large percentage of the faster roads connecting towns and cities have bike paths adjacent to the roadway, often on one side of the roadway but occasionally on both.  Bike traffic is two-way regardless of which side of the road you are on.  Since roads don't usually dilly-dally about getting from Point A to Point B, neither do these bike paths, so they are a relatively fast way of getting about, with the caveat that one does have to slow down at roundabouts (which have their own bike paths) and roads that cross the path to enter the road you are following.  Then there are other riders.  If there are two of them, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of them being side by side.  If they're a group of four, they'll ride in box formation, making it even harder to pass.  In short, one rarely gets to hammer away at a fast clip without interruption as one would going down the shoulder of a highway in, say, Montana.

 

Most trails are asphalt, but maybe 1 km in 20 has been on pavers such as in the next photo.  Only about 10 km of our 1250 km have been unpaved, and these were comparable to the "packed limestone" trails that are common in the U.S., especially in Wisconsin.  The second photo shows the most difficult km of the summer, since the trail had soft spots wherever a farmer crossed it from the sandy road on the right to his fields on the left, requiring us to dismount to be sure we didn't sink in and have a tumble off the bike.  The third and fourth photos are of dirt roads with paved bike paths next to them, something we encountered half a dozen times.  Only in Holland!

 

Most of the bike paths that we rode, however, followed canals and dikes and sometimes perhaps only an old cow path.  They often wander, but make up for it with scenery.  As in East Friesland, Germany, sheep take care of lawn maintenance on many of the dikes.  Those sheep guards are a little easier to bike across than cattle guards we've encountered in the U.S., but we've never had animal traffic jams in the States.

 

Country Roads

The large majority of country roads we've been on so far have trees lining one or both sides.  Very attractive, and some help on a windy day though dense vegetation alongside the road does a better job.  When it finally warmed up (for the first 3 weeks in Holland it never got above 18 C/ 65 F), these tree-lined roads were also a welcome bit of cool shade.  Dike roads, by contrast, never have shade.  In some areas, especially along the North Sea and along the IJsselmeer, the dike roads ran at the base of the dike, on the inner side.  More than once, this proved helpful as it helped shade us a bit from a strong cross wind.

While generally quiet, these roads do have car and truck traffic in both directions, even when they are nothing more than a narrow dike road.  When motor vehicles meet, they slow a bit and drive off their respective sides of the road.  It sometimes felt a bit close when they passed us, but we always somehow fit.

 

It seems like about 90% of the country roads have been smooth asphalt, about 10% brick or pavers or, in a very few places, rough cobblestones.  In small towns and cities both, the percentages reverse.  Pavers and bricks are bumpy and therefore slower -- partly because of greater road friction, mostly because it's not comfortable otherwise.  But then, we want to slow down and appreciate all that great Dutch architecture, so no problem.

 

Towns and cities frequently have one-way streets, but we have yet to find a single one that did not have a "Fietsers Uitgezonderd" ("Bicycles Excepted") sign, no matter how narrow or busy the street.  Again, this is not for the faint of heart, but the Dutch are used to squeezing past each other.  Just follow the British maxim, " keep calm and carry on," and you'll be fine.

 

 

Hills and Wind

Cyclists have a love-hate relationship with hills.  They can be hard to climb and they slow you down, for a hilly route is always slower than a flat route of the same distance.  On the other hand, they change your cadence and speed, now slow, now fast, and can make a ride more interesting for that reason alone, particularly when the hills are gently rolling.  Then there are those who enjoy the challenge of besting a steep hill, or hurtling down the other side.  And nothing beats the top of a hill for views.

If for any of these reasons you like biking where there are hills, you will be disappointed in Holland.  Only in the sand dune areas along the west coast and in the Veluwe, in the eastern part of Gelderland Province, did we find anything that looked like a hill.  You can do a 100 km / 62 mi. ride on a bike with an altimeter and record maybe 10 m / 30' of climbing for the day, all of that from bridges over highways or train tracks.  There are supposed to be hills in Limburg Province, in the SE corner of the Netherlands, but that is one of the 3 provinces we did not get to.  It was also quite flat in the small part of Antwerpen Province of Belgium that we explored.

We worried before coming to the Netherlands that the wind would be a big problem.  It turned out to be less of a problem than we expected.  For one thing, we had a lot of luck.  When we were headed west from Germany to the IJsselmeer and southwest from the Veluwe to Antwerp, we had about the same number of headwinds as tailwinds.  In our big push eastward from the west coast to the Veluwe, we had tailwinds every day.  Now 'headwind' and 'tailwind' are relative terms, since in Holland you rarely go very far in a straight line with a bike, nor with the wind straight at or straight behind you, but all in all, there were only a few days where we truly felt we had to battle the wind most of the day, or had it as a major ally.

And when you do have to battle the wind, you simply work a little harder, and go a bit slower.  One day with a strong headwind (~ 28 kph / 18 mph) while we were on top of a dike, we were down to a ground speed of 18 kph / 11 mph.  But not long after, we got off the dike, and frequent stands of trees broke the wind up, and our speed improved.  In still air we generally did 25 kph / 16 mph, and only hit 32 kph / 20 mph with a stiff tailwind.  But with many reasons to slow down -- to safely make a sharp turn, to look for road signs, to cross busy highways, to pass other cyclists, to ride on a brick-paved street, or even just to sight-see -- we rarely had the throttle full open for long. 

In short, wind was occasionally an annoyance, but not the obstacle we thought it might become, and it did vary our pace as we turned with or at angles to the wind, much like hills sometimes do.

 

Route Finding

How did we find our way about?  Primarily with the "Knooppunt" system.  It's designed primarily for the recreational cyclist and has its frustrations, but it did get us around the country quite safely and scenically.

"Knooppunt" literally means "knot point," and a knooppunt map looks something like a macramé design.  The idea is that you start at, let's say, Knooppunt 36 and want to head to the town of Stadskanaal on the map to the right.  At Knooppunt 36 you look for an arrow telling you which way to head to #37.  When there you look for the arrow to 38, then on to 45 and finally to 77.  The second photo is of a suggested round trip (Knooppunten 86 and 84 are actually a few blocks apart in the same starting town).  Just follow the numbered signs.

It's often not the shortest or fastest way, but it is effective in delivering you to the destination so long as you succeed in always finding and following the signs.  That's the rub.  There may have been one day in those three weeks when we found every sign that marked a turn, but we can't actually recall such a day.  Twice we rode an extra 10 km thanks to missed turns.  Writing down the distance between knooppunten did help ensure we didn't go too far out of the way.  Nonetheless, two or three times either our map or the sign was dead wrong, or a sign was unquestionably missing.  One day we had a nice tail wind, so our bike computer recorded our average speed after 24 km of riding as 24 kph / 15 mph.  But it calculates speed only when the wheel is moving, and we had actually taken 1 hr. 20 min. to do those 24 km.  The extra time had been spent in 5 or 6 stops to look at our map or to go back and look again at an intersection where we thought we might have missed a knooppunt sign!

 

 

The payoff was greater than the frustrations, however.  When the route seemed to wander, it was almost always to good purpose, such as to route us past a medieval church or down a quiet lane.  We never worried about biking into large cities, so confident did we get that the Knooppunt system would find us a safe and interesting route in and out.  We rode in quiet paces we never could have found otherwise.
 

 

Although most knooppunten have signs showing the system in that area, we needed more help than that so we purchased 4 maps at €5 ($6.50) per map to cover where we expected to ride in Holland, and found a similar map for the Antwerp area when we entered Belgium.  Jeff also looked at the next day's route the night before on  http://routeplanner.fietsersbond.nl/, a web site that has amazingly detailed bike maps of the whole country.  About halfway through our time in Holland he started making screen shots of these more detailed maps on our iPad, to be consulted during the day if and when we got lost.  We continued to get lost, of course, just not as badly or for as long.

There are, by the way, two alternative ways of getting about.  One is "mushrooms," little mushroom-shaped markers at intersections frequented by cyclists.  However the writing on them is small, the mushrooms sometimes a challenge to find even when they're there, and they are often not there at all.   There are also white signs with red lettering pointing to nearby cities, generally routing you to cycle paths alongside larger roads.  We followed these a few times when the knooppunten wandered too much, and thus struck a balance between fast and scenic ways of getting about.

 

And, last but not least, there is yet another option, the LF (long-distance bike route) system, which mostly strings together knooppunten into routes that go sometimes hundreds of kilometers, such as LF 10, which follows the North Sea from Germany to Belgium.  We liked to follow LF routes, since that gave us two signs to look for at each intersection, also using the green-on-white color scheme of the knooppunt signs.

 

Where to Go

We believe in guidebooks, at least as starting points for finding interesting places to see.  We relied heavily on a Lonely Planet guide, and were only disappointed once when it told us to see a museum that had closed for renovations a year earlier.  Otherwise it gave excelent advice, and we never regretted any of our choices of destination based on its advice.

We also found that the routes the Knooppunten directed us to also gave us a good cross-section of the Netherlands, a mix of farms, nature preserves, small towns, large cities, and canals, canals, canals.  Our "budget" was 200-300 km/wk., so we would rough out where that might take us, where we might want an extra day or two, and then actually did the booking of hotels 1-3 days ahead of time, depending on the weather forecast.  For us it was just the right pace, with only one 80 km/50 mi. day and one other that was slightly over 72 km/45 miles.  Our ideal was 35-50 km in a day.
 

 

This is less than we typically have ridden in the States.  In part it's that we found more interesting places to visit and/or photograph along the way, but also because it's virtually impossible to crank out miles the way you do in the U.S.  You slow to look for and read Knooppunt signs, to get around roundabouts, to cross busy roads crossing your bike path.  You slow for cars coming at you on a narrow road, for slow cyclists you want to pass, for brick roadways as you enter a town.  You get lost, you pull out a map, you get really lost and pull out the iPad with screen shots of the more detailed map.  In short, you slow down or stop more often than when you leave an American town by bike and see that the next town is a straight shot of 15 miles down the shoulder of the highway.  But it's all great fun.  No complaints, it's just a different style of biking.

 

Language

We rarely met a Dutch person who was not fluent in English.  It was written language we struggled with.  Signs in museums and at popular tourist destinations were rarely in any language but Dutch, while traffic signs and everything in supermarkets were uniformly monolingual.  More than once we pulled out our iPad in a supermarket or in a restaurant to use the Dutch-English dictionary we had loaded.  "What's 'Franse Uiensoep' again . . .?"  (btw, it's French Onion Soup).  We quickly learned what "Geen Fietsen Plaatsen" ("place no bikes here") meant and acquired a vocabulary of maybe 100 words, 90 of them food items.  Jeff also could sometimes figure out a word from its similarity to German.  In short, it was a challenge, and we did emerge from some museums with a little less insight than we'd hoped to acquire, but we survived, and mostly were able to laugh about our guesses as to what various signs were trying to tell us.
 

 

All in all, we loved our cycling adventure in Holland, and found the small part of Belgium we saw to be equally interesting, equally bike-friendly, even equally flat.  What's the biggest problem we've discovered?  That it will be hard to plan bike trips in the U.S., knowing that there is this wonderful place beckoning us to return and to explore even more of it.

Now off to England for our 19-day adventure there!