September 3, 2017
The Route: Dutch cheese, Windmills, German fluffy quilts, Fachwerk, French croissants, oh my.
We resolved early not to be so uptight, and to just grab a few miscellaneous maps and when the time came to just go. So we spent some fun weeks doing stuff like chopping and stacking wood and painting the house. But then we succumbed to our truer natures and tried to map and track out the whole darn trip in advance. Of course by then, time was short, causing problems.
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For example for the Saar, which is on our list this year, we did not have the Bikeline book, and too late to order it. But David Alston kindly offered to quickly mail his copy. In the meantime, we dragged open our shoe boxes of maps and pamphlets from past trips and scanned whatever sort of covered the territory (like a map of Saarland from the Saarland tourism people). Even so we checked the mailbox daily for the treasured Saar Radweg book. Nothing! Until yesterday! So now we ripped apart what we had cobbled together and built Bikeline in. It took all day.
Look in the photo at the high speed with which Dodie is absorbing the Saar book!
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There are of course many ways to go from Amsterdam to Paris. But this time around we are not looking for adventure in the sense of jumping over mountains or bushwacking through the French D road network. No, we want to calmly pedal, and as the headline says, just enjoy the amazing food, hotels, and architecture that are to be found in the wonderful regions of Holland, Friesland, Rhineland, Saarland, Alsace, Burgundy, the Loire, and Paris.
We have been in Netherlands twice before, but each time we were driven by having some difficult far off objective - like Berlin or Vienna. So although we enjoyed the visits, we never felt like we had spent enough time among the quaint brick houses, thatched roofs, windmills, cheese, and of course cycle ways. This time we also feel drawn by the destinations down the road, but we do want to spend a little time in Netherlands. Because of that, instead of just beetling south after landing in Amsterdam, we will head north through North Holland (North Holland is one of thirteen provinces that make up the Netherlands). Then we will cross the Afsluitdijk - the dike that cut off the sea (the Zuiderzee) and created the huge "lake", the Iselmeer. On the other side is Friesland, and a pile of other provinces too.
Trying to decide where to go is made easy, and hard, by the insane number of long and short distance cycle ways in Netherlands. Just look at the map below. The red lines are some of the long distance routes, and the green ones are short routes. It's even more than that, because the long routes have often been combined into "themed" routes (like the Zuiderzee route, the Coast route, the Rhine route, the circle of Netherlands, etc.) and there are trans-european ways (like Eurovelo 12 and 15) wandering around too.
If you have a closer look at those green ways, you see that each junction (Knooppunt) has a number. There are maps that show these junctions, allowing people to also navigate from junction to junction. There is even at least one website that shows every junction in Netherlands and Belgium and purports to plot a route from any one to any other, and to either print the result or download a GPS track. I have not figured out this site, which claims to have 49,153 km of routes in 20,906 "trajectories". A method like that would be overkill for us and really too slow, because at each junction you need to find and follow the correct arrow leading to the desired next junction number.
So what will we really do? Generally we will whip around the Iselmeer, but stay inland, though not passing through the most eastern provinces. We made a list of likely towns, and the long distance route numbers that join these, but we are not sure if we need to rely on GPS tracks made at home, on finding the long distance (LF) route numbers, or on following signs that mention the town names. We can't really get lost - or can we?
After we whip around the Iselmeer (not really a whip - because it is a couple of hundred km) we could jump onto the Rhine, around Arnhem/Nijmegen and head on down past Koln and Bonn, toward Koblenz. On the other hand, that northern portion of the Rhine is pretty blah. so we are thinking to stay in Netherlands until the bitter end, which is Maastricht. From there we will have to make our way to the Rhine. That calls for some kind of route from Maastricht to the Rhine - probably at Remagen, which is 25 km south of Bonn, or at Koln.
Ultimately we are trying to get to Koblenz, because that is where the Mosel enters the Rhine. The Mosel is the most lovely bike route there is, so we want to get on it, as far as Trier - or actually Konz, a little bit further up river.
Konz is where the Saar enters the Mosel. Although we have visited Saarburg (the first big town up the Saar) by car, that only made us want to get on the cycle way. So it will be the Saar Radweg and whatever else we then have to do to return to the Rhine, at Strasbourg. In our list of regions, this all puts us in Alsace.
Since Strasbourg is on the Rhine, we could follow the Rhine, but instead we will take a canal, to near Colmar (Neuf Brisach), and from there to Mulhouse.
Mulhouse is not actually pronounced "mule house", but rather the French say "moule ooze". Since Alsace passed back and forth between France and Germany, it also had the German name Mülhausen. To be fair, the darn place actually started as part of Switzerland. We'll just call it Mulhouse.
From Mulhouse we enter the Saone region, and follow Eurovelo 6. We could carry on with this until we hit the Loire, at Nevers. But this time around we have it in mind to head up to Dijon. There is the Canal de Bourgogne, which could take us close to Montargis.
From near Montargis, Eurovelo 3 heads on in to Paris.
Honey, we're home!
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