Our riding is complete! We cycled a total of 1,238 kilometers with 8,574 meters of climbing over 24 rides from April 30th to May 23rd. You can see the details of each ride by clicking here.
Our friend Ben helped us plan the last route from Asperen to Amersfoort (his childhood home). We had planned to ride through Utrecht on the way to Amersfoort, but Ben said Utrecht has many highways and canals and is congested with bicycles.
He plotted a much more pleasant route for us that included a huge lock complex on the Rhine (it was a challenge for heights-averse Patti so she rewarded herself with the Belgian chocolate she’d purchased last week), forests with very elegant mansions and horse trails, lightly travelled roads on the tops of dikes alongside canals, and a very pretty windmill. Perfect.
The weather alternated between nice (sunny and windy) and nasty (rainy and cold and windy) for our final ride, but not ‘Ireland nasty’. Just a few short-lived cold showers and one quick hail storm while we were on a short ferry ride. (Sorry, no pictures of that, it was all we could do to keep from being blown off the ferry.) A little later, along with a half dozen other folks, we ended up taking refuge under that “very pretty windmill” during one of the rains.
In fact, it rained seven times on that 68 km ride but who’s counting??!!! It was the only “kind of horrible” weather we had during our whole cycling trip; we can’t complain.
We put the trikes into storage (thank you so much, Ben!!!) and gratefully accepted a ride from there – in a beautiful, warm, fully electric VW van (cool) from Landgoed de Salentein – to our hotel in Amersfoort.
Our room wasn’t ready so we warmed up with soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. Can we just take a moment and think about how comforting a hot bowl of soup can be on a cold, wet day?
Our hotel – Hotel Amrath Berghotel Amersfoort – has an interesting history: it has been around since 1880, owned by various families. During WWII, like many other buildings in occupied Europe, it was taken over by the Germans. They used the dining room as a court where they ‘tried’ Dutch resistance fighters and prisoners/interns of the nearby “Camp Amersfoort”, a concentration camp which was famous for its inhumane treatment of its inmates. Residents of Amersfoort talked about watching fearfully from behind the curtains in their homes as prisoners were marched from the train station to the Camp. There is a Canadian element to this story, details are at this link.
Once we were in our room, we purchased the train tickets for tomorrow’s day trip to Amsterdam to visit the RijksMuseum and the Anne Frank Huis.
Travellers’ tip: if you plan to visit either of those two places, you must purchase your tickets well in advance. Patti had bought these tickets in March on excellent advice from one of our other Dutch friends/coaches, Johan. Good thing too: Anne Frank Huis was completely sold out, the next day. There were a lot of disappointed people outside the house.
Comfortable in our dry room and in the knowledge that our bikes were safely stowed until we pick them up in September, we fell asleep! Normandy/Vimy/Belgium/Holland Cycling Trip Spring 2025: done.
(Stay tuned if you want to hear more about sightseeing in Amsterdam, Hamburg and Copenhagen. We fly home on Saturday May 31.)
