The past two days

Thursday Sept 9th, Amsterdam to Den Haag (95k)


This morning we had to make our way out of Amsterdam toward Christiaan's (Amie and Erin's friend from Bowdoin who's dutch) house in Den Haag. Making our way out of the city was about as nuts as making our way into it! Narrow paths, crazy dutch cyclists, fast cars. We made it onto the route of trails known as the LF cycling network. Sometimes the trails were alongside roads, through forests, along canals, or made of cobblestone. The trails system is made up of numbered intersections. We made a slow way to Den Haag, since navigation was so tough we got a lot of help from locals. One couple even found us looking lost on a street corner between two signs that said "Den Haag" in different directions. They rode us about 10 blocks back to the proper trail - they were planning on spending 5 months biking through China! They're crazy. Shortly thereafter, we thought we'd made it to Den Haag, but found ourselves in Zeihoseiorghslklg.hjskhllll.... somewhere, as a dog walker kindly informed us. So we were tired and hungry (erin was a little hangry) and we still had to find Christiaan, without a phone and without definite internet... At a gas station we found a map of Den Haag and found a Stayokay hostel that happened to be nearby. We called christian, locked up our bikes, and went out to drinks and dinner with Christian and two of his friends from home. It was a great way to end the long day with a familiar friendly face. Tomorrow we'll head south to Domburg.



Friday, Sept 10th Den Haag to Vlissingen on a train, then Vlissingen to Domburg, 30k



So.... Domburg is actually really far away, something like 100k (60mi) and with the crazy, twisting paths to navigate and strange terrain we can't cover ground that fast. What's cool about biking here is how the paths constantly change direction, surface, view everything. Anyway, we decided we didn't want to get ourselves into a situation by trying to navigate the whole day (in bad weather, it was windy and rainy today). Plus we're sleeping in a castle tonight... so, we wanted to get there to play in it first. So we hopped on a train (the station was right next to our hostel) to Vlissingen (sounds like flisinger). In Vlissinger we found a library (bilioveek...) where we caught up on emails and got the next day's hostel booked. Then we hopped back onto the LF trail system, and biked about 25k to Domburg (more like 30 maybe because we did some lost off-roading right around our hostel before we found it.) Then there wasn't room for dinner there... and we don't have fuel yet (though we do have a new bottle), so we biked into Domburg center and found a bunch of very up-scale vacation-townie restaurants. McKayla spotted a decently cheap one so we had an awesome dinner and biked back to our Castle for the night. We're heading south to Belgium near Bruges tomorrow!