To Goedereede

August 25, 2024

For several days now I’ve been planning when the time came to whip out some sort of post-mortem on our time in the U.K. - some very insightful thoughts on what the experience was like for us the second time around, embellished with a comprehensive map of the actual route, some statistics, maybe a gallery of favorite photos or bird shots. Now that we’re here though it’s obvious that won’t be happening. The tour isn’t taking a time-out to wait for it, time marches on, and life’s coming at us too fast. And it really is coming fast: today Holland, Belgium four days later, France three more after that. Who’s got time for reflection in the face of headwinds like that? If there’s going to be a recap I’m pretty sure it’s going to need to wait for a slow day in Tucson this winter.

Well, maybe there’s time for at least a few statistics if we’re quick about it:

Flat tires: 1
Pounds unspent: 10
New birds for the year: 35
Lifetime first birds: 14
Train trips: at least 7
Train trips on the wrong train: 1
Lost wallets, glasses, phones, iPads, passports: all Zero!!!

For the hope chest. We were surprised at the end to find how hard it was to spend down our cash, but one place after another took only plastic.

And speaking of life coming at us at turbo speed: our ferry is due in at Hook at 8:00, so we set the alarm for 6:15 in order to make it down to breakfast for first orders at 6:30. It’s pitch black in the windowless cabin when we wake up, so the day begins with me opening my iPad and flashing it up to the ceiling so Rachael can see the light switch on the ceiling above her. She’s upstairs in the upper bunk, and I help her down by placing and securing her feet one step at a time as she walks down the metal ladder backwards, its narrow rungs cutting painfully into her bare feet.

When we walk into the dining hall though we’re surprised by how full it is already; and I am shocked to look out the window and see land off to the side. We must be arriving ahead of schedule, I assume. We quickly order our last Full English of the summer and almost immediately an announcement comes out over the loud speaker that we’ll be landing soon. As we’re shoveling food into our faces and Rachael’s guzzling down her second cup of coffee in about three minutes we realize what’s going on. We crossed a time zone in the middle of the night and lost an hour.

We’re quite proud of the fact that we managed to clear our room and make it down to the bikes and get them loaded before the ramp drops; and as far as we know so far at least we didn’t leave anything behind.

I’ve never understood why there are two lines, one for All Passports and one for homebodies coming home to roost. Or rather I get why there are two lines, but doesn’t All mean all?

We’ve come a very long ways in the last seven hours, and much more has changed than the time zone. As usual, we’ve come to a new country and culture with typical Team Anderson ignorance, our heads filled with little more than the bare basics. We know Holland is flat, with large stretches lying below sea level but protected by dikes and sea walls; and we know it’s the land of windmills, or at least was in the past; and we know it’s got some of the most advanced cycling infrastructure in the world. That about covers it though. We arrive expecting to be surprised, and are.

One surprise is at how rural it feels. My mental image is of places like Amsterdam and Rotterdam, but within a half mile of leaving the ship we’re biking past farmland, with the bike path lined with fences penning in grazing farm animals - sheep, horses, cattle, even an alpaca! - all close enough that they give the feel of a petting zoo. And just beyond that is a wide waterway, the Nieuwe Maas (New Meuse), a distributary of the Rhine, busy with shipping traflic; and beyond that is the North Sea.

And now when I study the map after looking up the name of this waterway, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never understood that we’d be crossing the Rhine delta here, after it’s bent west toward the sea. In my very simple-minded mental map of Northern Europe I’ve always thought of the Rhine as continuing north and ending somewhere near Denmark. So look - already I’m smarter for having come here!

Our ride today sounds easy enough on paper - 25 nearly perfectly flat miles on a dry, comfortable day. We’ll take our time and arrive in Goedereede in time for lunch. It’s quite windy as we can see by the rapidly spinning wind generators towering above - but it doesn’t really impede us for the first eight miles as we bike southeast along the bank of the Niewe Maas. We’re in no rush, and just barely keep pace with a long black tanker going our direction.

Our first impression of Holland: windmills, water, and a wide bike path.

Looking back toward the ferry, I’m unclear whether either of these is a working lighthouse or part of a lighthouse museum.

Look at all those swans! And the long black stripe (the TEN) that splits the image is the tanker that we’ll race southeast for the next eight miles.

The easy part of the ride comes to an abrupt end when we arrive at the ferry terminal at Maassluis and our passage across the Nieuwe Maas. We knew this crossing was here waiting for us, but were disappointed to arrive with the ferry docked but precisely as its deck went up. Hey, wait for us I want to shout but of course don’t, knowing it would make no difference other than to make me look foolish.

I looked up the schedule of this ferry in planning our trip, but it’s been a long time ago now. In my head is the idea that it crosses about once an hour, but that’s probably a carryover from the schedule at Felixstowe yesterday. I look up at the posted schedule though and I see that it crosses every twenty minutes, so we just relax and watch the ships and swans while we wait. By the time the ferry returns we’ve been joined by perhaps thirty other cyclists arriving singly and in small groups.

We have cash handy, but cash won’t do and Rachael hurriedly digs into her pannier to retrieve her purse and a credit card so we can buy our way on board where we join those thirty other bikers in a narrow side aisle that we almost completely fill. One of the other bikers generously offers to pick up fares until it’s clear that we Are equipped to pay our own way.

When we all roll off at the other end, there’s another queue of twenty or thirty bikes waiting to board going the other direction. I wonder how many bikes cross this ferry on a typical day?

This is about half of our crowd. I’m standing in the midpoint of the aisle, and Rachael and another ten or so bikes are behind my back.

Those going the other direction. It didn’t occur to me to check out the car situation, so I have no idea if many cars are boarding here also.

The nature of the ride changes markedly when we get off the ferry. At first we’re biking through an attractive small town, Rozenburg, following a narrow canal lined here and there with weeping willows. Just ahead of us a grey heron stands still right beside the bike path intently eyeing the canal, and not long after that we pass a family of Egyptian geese - which definitely makes me happy, seeing a new bird for the year on our first day back on the mainland. I’m back to thinking I might get to 300 species this year after all.

It’s not long though before we cross another waterway, this time q a robust bridge. And just on the other side we come to the first of what we’ll find is a common feature here: a cycling map, showing all of the cycling routes in the area we’re entering. It’s a very impressive navigational system - not only is there this very dense network of cycle paths taking you everywhere, but navigation is all laid out for you by a network of numbered nodes. You don’t really need much of a map to work your way through south Holland - you can just connect the dots.

Leaving Rozenburg’s small island and crossing the Brielse Meer.

These Fietsroute maps are really impressive. Zoom in on the left and see the instructions for how to make use of the map, in four languages.

So we’re in Voorne now, which I’ll realize when I look it up later is an island. So that’s another new fact to me - I hadn’t understood or noticed before that south Holland is nearly an archipelago, a series of good sized islands bounded by distributaries of the Rhine or smaller canals, and protected from being inundated by the sea by dikes and enormous dams. We’ll cross one of these dams when we come to the south side of Voorne and cross the next major inlet to Goeree-Overflakkee, the island that holds our destination for today.

And the dam, the Haringvlietdam, really is huge - about two miles long - and it takes us a long time to cross it because we’re going so slow. Once we came to Rozenburg we took a ninety degree change in direction and are now biking southwest, nearly head on into a 20 mph headwind.

If you’re as new to this part of the world as we are, you might appreciate this article about the Haringvliet, the dam crossing it, and the history of this part of Holland. construxtion on the dam began after the great, devastating flood of 1953 that left all of the island ahead submerged.

We’re stopped at roughly the midpoint of the dam, looking back. We’re at bay #11 of about 20, stopped partly to witness this remarkable engineering project and partly to get a breather from the ceaseless headwind.

I stop for very few photos in the last ten miles, both of us mostly keeping our heads down plowing into the wind and trusting that Rachael’s video will give a sense of the landscape here.

It’s roughly 12:30 when we arrive ant our stop for the night, Goedereede, and cross the canal into its small central market square. We’re standing by a building checking out the address of our hotel and are surprised to find that we’ve leaned our bikes against it; and then someone knocks on the door, they’re let in, and soon so are we. It’s a surprise to be able to get to our room so soon. Rachael settles in there while I go down to the common area and help myself to a beer available on the honor system and then go upstairs to join her.

Goedereede looks like a very special place and well worth an exploration. It’s still early in the day though and there’s time for that later. For now it’s time for a well earned nap.

In Goedereede. Our lodging, the Azul Boutique Hotel, is the brownstone building just edging out on the left.

Video sound track: Windsong, by Ralph Towner, Wolfgang Muthspiel & Slava Grigoryan

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Today's ride: 26 miles (42 km)
Total: 3,489 miles (5,615 km)

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Gregory GarceauI liked seeing cyclists, wind turbines, or both, in almost every one of your pictures today. I didn't see a single one of those famous Dutch windmills though. If I know you, that oversight will be corrected in the upcoming days--unless they've all been taken down because they don't produce enough electricity. (Oh wait, only the U.S. removes historic structures for reasons like that.)
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2 months ago

Scott AndersonTo Gregory GarceauWindmills? In Holland? Thanks for the tip, I’ll keep my eyes peeled.
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2 months ago

Andrea BrownAnd tulips! Oh wait, it's August.

My people are from Hillegersberg, which is now a suburb of Rotterdam. Maybe you'll shuffle through there, although it was all still farmland when they left in 1908.
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2 months ago

Scott AndersonTo Andrea BrownI don’t think I knew you were Dutch! It looks like it would have been a lovely place to be from, even now. Not that we’ll know now though, because we’re south of it already and ain’t turning back.
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2 months ago