20th Anniversary European Bike Adventure Day 5: Amsterdam to Emmeloord
Back on the road!
We bid a fond farewell to our little houseboat, and hit the road again around 8:30am.
I mean, I could stand to wake up to that every morning.
First mission? Of course, breakfast.
We bravely didn't lock the bikes up! Ha.
Eventually we would get to days where food was hard to come by and not nearly as delicious, so.. we had to partake while we could.
We got to watch some of the commute insanity at the intersection next to our table (SO MANY BIKES), but by the time we headed out, it wasn't too bad at all. Hopped on another bike path, wound through the city a bit, and then up and over a bridge and back into the world of Amazing Bike Paths Through the Middle of Nowhere!
I mean, seriously. This path is just for bikes. No cars. No traffic. And goes from city to city to city.
On our way to Amsterdam, we'd ridden over a couple things that looked like tame versions of Texas cattle guards, but we weren't positive that's what they were, and we'd never seen any livestock that they might be there to contain. Until we were just out of Amsterdam! Then we were meandering down a little fietspad and came upon THIS!
HELLO NEWEST FRIEND!
I may have seriously considered just staying here forever.
This went on for several minutes down this path!
On the OPPOSITE side of the coin for this day was our first forced re-route. We were following our route, no problems, out in what seemed like the middle of nowhere (but then suddenly dozens of school children came riding their bikes by in the opposite direction, with chaperones, so maybe a field trip? A field trip on bikes? That kind of thing doesn't happen in the US..)..
Oh, hey, I didn't think I had video of this, but going back and reviewing the GoPro video, here it is!
Things started looking a little sketchy as we approached a construction site, but our route said to turn right before the construction, so we did. And then the road turned to dirt. And there were barriers. And then our road.. ended.
The barriers are behind us, because obviously we went around them.
Okay! Bridge is missing. Can't really just keep riding through that.
Now at this point, if I were alone, I would probably just sit on the ground and cry. But I'm terrible with directions and maps. Matt is great with maps, great with directions, had actually looked at our route for the day, consulted google maps, figured out a way we could go back to the path we'd been on, go up further a bit, and cross in a little town we otherwise wouldn't have gone through. And we did all that, and it got us back on course enough that google maps could re-route us, and we only added on a couple extra miles. I don't even know if Matt was phased by the whole thing, but if he was, I certainly couldn't tell. It was amazing.
AND as a bonus, we ended up riding through some really neat forest areas that I'm not sure we would have gotten to see otherwise!
Look how tiny this fietspad is, while still being so beautifully paved with no potholes or cracks or chipseal! In the middle of freakin' nowhere!
We did end up eventually crossing that river elsewhere, which required walking our bikes across this dam control gate. But we managed that without any negative incidents at all! (This is foreshadowing. But that's not for many, many days to come.)
And then.. to the coast! We rode along the coast of, evidently, the Markermeer, for several miles. And on paper, or in photos, it was lovely and serene. In REALITY, it was FULL OF BUGS.
See? So lovely! And a bike path completely separate from the cars, so we never had any traffic issues at all!
Oh, look, it's one of the MANY TIMES Matt had to stop and get bugs out of his helmet, his eyes, his mouth. It was bad for me, but because I was behind Matt, it wasn't NEARLY as bad for me as it was for him. The beauty.. it was hard to appreciate through this part.
Look! You can SEE THE BUGS.
Partly because it was about time for lunch, and partly because we just needed a break from all the damn bugs, we stopped at a little shopping center on the water and recaffeinated and recalorated.
Matt demonstrating dispensing mayo from a tube onto his fries. When in Rome..
After lunch, we continued back on a coastal path, but evidently this is not the path the bugs hang out on, because it was practically bug-free, and we actually got to ENJOY the beauty. And talk again. You don't want to talk when bugs are flying into your mouth.
Not the windmills you see in Netherlands postcards, but there were a lot more of these than the typical picturesque ones.
Right after this picture was taken, both our bikes fell over. It was windy out there.
To get from there to Emmeloord required crossing some water. In the years and months before we took this trip, Matt had gone through most of our route in google maps, just making sure things looked viable and not scary, and in some cases zooming way in to street view to check out spots that might be weird. So he actually knew that there was a big bridge we had to go over going into Emmeloord. One we'd share with cars and other bikes, in a sort of unique way. And Matt is not a fan of heights at all. So he was a little anxious about this bridge.
What you can't see here is the wind that was hitting us from the side. And the cars that were going BOTH directions next to us.
But it turned out to be a non-issue! Matt was nervous, but fine, and it was a unique experience. I actually took GoPro video of it, which is 3 minutes which may not be super riveting, but it's an interesting bridge setup. Most cars are in the middle, far from us. But our little section of the bridge has a bike lane on both sides, each direction. And then one single car lane in the middle for cars going both directions. How it works, I have no idea, but it did, and we didn't die!
After that it was a fairly boring ride into Emmeloord. Though the outskirts of town were notably the first time we actually saw trash on the fietspad. All the bike paths had been SO clean. Almost eerily so. We later saw street sweepers out on the paths several times, so they make a real effort to keep them so clean and clear. Just interesting that there was no trash around Amsterdam, but was around Emmeloord, a comparatively much smaller city.
A little construction and traffic made for some stress trying to find our airbnb, but we were happy to roll up and find it with no real difficulty. And it was adorable!
A tiny little separate guest house all our own!
It wasn't huge, but it was exactly what we needed, and it was just a lovely place.
This is really almost all of the house, other than the bathroom, and a bed in the loft upstairs.
Maybe not a good place to stay if you're mobility-impaired in any way.
We parked our bikes on the little back deck garden, showered, then headed into town to find dinner.
We didn't lock them! Getting so bold!
Finding dinner was.. more challenging than we anticipated. Downtown was basically a big strip mall, and that strip mall shuts down around 5pm. It was a ghost town through there. We ended up finding 3 places that were open, and waffling back and forth between them. We thought we'd decided on one, but when we walked in, the music they were playing was so truly terrible and loud, we walked back out. Finally we let our hearts and our missing of the dogs decide for us.
'Cause, you know, our dog is named Enzo. What? How do YOU choose where you eat?!
Then a short walk back home, and bedtime in anticipation of our final full day of riding within the Netherlands!
You may notice I'm wearing one of two shirts in all these videos. That's because I only had two shirts.
Total miles for day 5: 61.91 miles from Amsterdam to Emmeloord, Netherlands
We bid a fond farewell to our little houseboat, and hit the road again around 8:30am.
I mean, I could stand to wake up to that every morning.
First mission? Of course, breakfast.
We bravely didn't lock the bikes up! Ha.
Eventually we would get to days where food was hard to come by and not nearly as delicious, so.. we had to partake while we could.
We got to watch some of the commute insanity at the intersection next to our table (SO MANY BIKES), but by the time we headed out, it wasn't too bad at all. Hopped on another bike path, wound through the city a bit, and then up and over a bridge and back into the world of Amazing Bike Paths Through the Middle of Nowhere!
I mean, seriously. This path is just for bikes. No cars. No traffic. And goes from city to city to city.
On our way to Amsterdam, we'd ridden over a couple things that looked like tame versions of Texas cattle guards, but we weren't positive that's what they were, and we'd never seen any livestock that they might be there to contain. Until we were just out of Amsterdam! Then we were meandering down a little fietspad and came upon THIS!
HELLO NEWEST FRIEND!
I may have seriously considered just staying here forever.
Click to viewThis went on for several minutes down this path!
On the OPPOSITE side of the coin for this day was our first forced re-route. We were following our route, no problems, out in what seemed like the middle of nowhere (but then suddenly dozens of school children came riding their bikes by in the opposite direction, with chaperones, so maybe a field trip? A field trip on bikes? That kind of thing doesn't happen in the US..)..
Oh, hey, I didn't think I had video of this, but going back and reviewing the GoPro video, here it is!
Things started looking a little sketchy as we approached a construction site, but our route said to turn right before the construction, so we did. And then the road turned to dirt. And there were barriers. And then our road.. ended.
The barriers are behind us, because obviously we went around them.
Okay! Bridge is missing. Can't really just keep riding through that.
Now at this point, if I were alone, I would probably just sit on the ground and cry. But I'm terrible with directions and maps. Matt is great with maps, great with directions, had actually looked at our route for the day, consulted google maps, figured out a way we could go back to the path we'd been on, go up further a bit, and cross in a little town we otherwise wouldn't have gone through. And we did all that, and it got us back on course enough that google maps could re-route us, and we only added on a couple extra miles. I don't even know if Matt was phased by the whole thing, but if he was, I certainly couldn't tell. It was amazing.
AND as a bonus, we ended up riding through some really neat forest areas that I'm not sure we would have gotten to see otherwise!
Look how tiny this fietspad is, while still being so beautifully paved with no potholes or cracks or chipseal! In the middle of freakin' nowhere!
We did end up eventually crossing that river elsewhere, which required walking our bikes across this dam control gate. But we managed that without any negative incidents at all! (This is foreshadowing. But that's not for many, many days to come.)
And then.. to the coast! We rode along the coast of, evidently, the Markermeer, for several miles. And on paper, or in photos, it was lovely and serene. In REALITY, it was FULL OF BUGS.
See? So lovely! And a bike path completely separate from the cars, so we never had any traffic issues at all!
Oh, look, it's one of the MANY TIMES Matt had to stop and get bugs out of his helmet, his eyes, his mouth. It was bad for me, but because I was behind Matt, it wasn't NEARLY as bad for me as it was for him. The beauty.. it was hard to appreciate through this part.
Look! You can SEE THE BUGS.
Partly because it was about time for lunch, and partly because we just needed a break from all the damn bugs, we stopped at a little shopping center on the water and recaffeinated and recalorated.
Matt demonstrating dispensing mayo from a tube onto his fries. When in Rome..
After lunch, we continued back on a coastal path, but evidently this is not the path the bugs hang out on, because it was practically bug-free, and we actually got to ENJOY the beauty. And talk again. You don't want to talk when bugs are flying into your mouth.
Not the windmills you see in Netherlands postcards, but there were a lot more of these than the typical picturesque ones.
Right after this picture was taken, both our bikes fell over. It was windy out there.
To get from there to Emmeloord required crossing some water. In the years and months before we took this trip, Matt had gone through most of our route in google maps, just making sure things looked viable and not scary, and in some cases zooming way in to street view to check out spots that might be weird. So he actually knew that there was a big bridge we had to go over going into Emmeloord. One we'd share with cars and other bikes, in a sort of unique way. And Matt is not a fan of heights at all. So he was a little anxious about this bridge.
What you can't see here is the wind that was hitting us from the side. And the cars that were going BOTH directions next to us.
But it turned out to be a non-issue! Matt was nervous, but fine, and it was a unique experience. I actually took GoPro video of it, which is 3 minutes which may not be super riveting, but it's an interesting bridge setup. Most cars are in the middle, far from us. But our little section of the bridge has a bike lane on both sides, each direction. And then one single car lane in the middle for cars going both directions. How it works, I have no idea, but it did, and we didn't die!
After that it was a fairly boring ride into Emmeloord. Though the outskirts of town were notably the first time we actually saw trash on the fietspad. All the bike paths had been SO clean. Almost eerily so. We later saw street sweepers out on the paths several times, so they make a real effort to keep them so clean and clear. Just interesting that there was no trash around Amsterdam, but was around Emmeloord, a comparatively much smaller city.
A little construction and traffic made for some stress trying to find our airbnb, but we were happy to roll up and find it with no real difficulty. And it was adorable!
A tiny little separate guest house all our own!
It wasn't huge, but it was exactly what we needed, and it was just a lovely place.
This is really almost all of the house, other than the bathroom, and a bed in the loft upstairs.
Maybe not a good place to stay if you're mobility-impaired in any way.
We parked our bikes on the little back deck garden, showered, then headed into town to find dinner.
We didn't lock them! Getting so bold!
Finding dinner was.. more challenging than we anticipated. Downtown was basically a big strip mall, and that strip mall shuts down around 5pm. It was a ghost town through there. We ended up finding 3 places that were open, and waffling back and forth between them. We thought we'd decided on one, but when we walked in, the music they were playing was so truly terrible and loud, we walked back out. Finally we let our hearts and our missing of the dogs decide for us.
'Cause, you know, our dog is named Enzo. What? How do YOU choose where you eat?!
Then a short walk back home, and bedtime in anticipation of our final full day of riding within the Netherlands!
You may notice I'm wearing one of two shirts in all these videos. That's because I only had two shirts.
Total miles for day 5: 61.91 miles from Amsterdam to Emmeloord, Netherlands