Dale and I flew to Amsterdam in April 2003 and took the train to Giessen, Germany, where our three Cab-Bikes were waiting for us. Our daughter Erika was at the University of Vienna; she came up to Giessen by train for spring break. We needed to get the Cab-Bikes to Rotterdam, where the shipper was located, but we faced several constraints. Erika hadn't done much cycling, so we wanted to avoid city traffic and hills. We had bought Bikeline guidebooks for the Rhine and Main River bike routes, and could see that an all-cycling route along the rivers would be too long and too urban. Cutting across the hills between Giessen and the lower Rhine by train would shorten the trip considerably. We consulted Margitta Hoffmann of Cab-Bike to select a train that would start at Giessen and end in Krefeld, allowing sufficient time for loading and unloading.
Fitting three Cab-Bikes into the bicycle car on a train requires some time and packing skills, but we did it. It helped to choose the earliest train on a Sunday morning, so that we didn't have any competition for the space.
Krefeld is near Cologne, well into the flat lowlands that stretch northwards into the Netherlands. When we arrived, railroad personnel helped us cross the tracks and opened an exit gate for us, bypassing the stairs between the platform and the station.
From there, we rode through the city to Nordwall Strasse and went left (west) to the Ring, where we followed Westparkstrasse to Konrad Adenauer Platz, turned left for about three blocks and then went right on Kempener Allee, which is a marked bike route. We followed Kempener Allee until shortly after it turned into Venloer Strasse, where the bike path left it and headed in a loop to the west of town before coming back to Venloer Strasse (For this, we had a "Radwanderkarte" called "Fahrrad-freundliches Krefeld" from 1993 that was given to us by a helpful guy near the train station.)
Using a Kompass Wander- und Radtourenkarte (752) Niederrhein Nord 1:50 000, we headed west to Kempen, where we spent the night. We had to ask directions several times along the way. The same map showed a bike route going north and a little east through St. Hubert, Stenden, and Aldekerk. There is a road numbered "9" that runs northwest from Krefeld to Kevelaer, which was the direction we wanted to go. It had a parallel bikeway along much of its length, but at the towns the bikeway would end. We got lost in Aldekerk and Nieukerk, but they were lovely little towns with friendly people who gave us directions. As we approached Geldern, we decided to head for smaller towns. A nice lady suggested Walbeck, which we reached by following the Herrensitz bike route. We spent the night in Walbeck at the Spargelhaus hotel. That means "asparagus house," and the asparagus season had just started, so we had a nice meal.
We left Walbeck on a forest road toward Feriendorf in Holland, then went down into Arcen and bought a lot of detailed maps of the Netherlands with cycling information at the local VVV (tourist office).
They are titled Kaart voor vakantie en vrije tijd (or map for vacation and free time) and are produced by Falk in cooperation with the ANWB (the Dutch automobile association, which still reflects its origin as a bicycling association in its initials). They cover the Netherlands in 41 overlapping segments. We used numbers 38, 35, 34, 21, 26, and 27.
Our first night in the Netherlands was in Venray. The next day, we rode through Vredepel, Rips, Gemert, Erp, Veghel, Heeswijk-Dinther (where the lady in the VVV was especially helpful and was able to find us the maps we couldn't find in Arcen), all on map 35, then turned to map 34 to get into 'sHertogenbosch. The routes between towns were easy to follow, because there would be white signs with red destination names on them, but the routes through the towns were less clear. We stayed in the center of town, parking the Cab-Bikes in the hotel garage, three in one parking spot. In the morning, we had some difficulty finding our way out of town to the west, apparently failing to see the bike path under the railroad station and detouring a bit to the south. A bike and motorbike bridge over the A59 highway led to a lightly-traveled road and bike path through Haarsteeg and up to Herpt. We got somewhat lost in an island town called Heusden, but found our way to the bridge over the Maas. We were entirely ready for a rest break and lunch when we arrived in Wijk en Aalburg. Helpful people told us how to get up onto the dike and find a restaurant; they recommended that we ride the dike road, although it wasn't labeled on the map as a bike route. It was a beautiful little road without much traffic. We followed the dike for much of the way to Woudrichem, passing through Giessen on the way. (map 21) We stopped to take a picture to show that we had gotten from Giessen, Germany to Giessen, Netherlands.
At Woudrichem, we took a bike and pedestrian ferry across the Boven Merwede, which forms where the Waal meets the Maas. We were pleasantly surprised to find it a very large boat with plenty of room for us and an easy ramp to get in and out. The crossing brought us into Gorinchem, which was confusing to get out of. We asked a pedestrian for advice, but she directed us the wrong way. Three boys with spiked hair and bikes gave us the right directions to get to Schoonhoven, where we took a ferry for cars over the Lek. We got some more unreliable advice from a man who probably never rode a bicycle, but we recognized that he was routing us on the highways, so we followed our map and left Schoonhoven on a bike route and very small roads along the Vlist toward Gouda.
Our arrival in Gouda ended our time in the more rural south and brought us to the fringes of the Randstad (or edge city, an urbanized area extending from Rotterdam to Amsterdam). To the south, it was distinctly useful to have bought a language tape and learned some Dutch phrases, because even in the hotels there were people who didn't speak English or German, and we often had to ask directions on the road in Dutch. Further north, in the heavily touristed areas and the industrial centers, English seemed to be no problem at all. With the heavier concentration of people comes a higher crime rate, and we wanted secure storage for our Cab-Bikes so that we could take the train to Vienna for Easter. The place for secure bike storage in Holland is the train station, which generally has a Fietspoint, where parts and repairs are available, a few bikes are for sale, and there is a huge enclosed garage for bikes and motorbikes. Trikes park for the motorbike rate. We pulled in to the railway station (after getting directions from a helpful native) and were somewhat startled to find a Cab-Bike enthusiast running it, and delighted to find that he spoke the Bavarian dialect of German, which is close to the Austrian German that we're used to. He settled our Cab-Bikes in for a couple days, and we took our side trip to Vienna by train.
We arrived back in Gouda on Easter Monday, a holiday in much of Europe. Riding north from Gouda to Waddinxveen, we found ourselves in a bike festival with a major bike race blocking our planned route. We relaxed and enjoyed that race, but when all the junior classes started racing past, we figured we would have to change directions. We would have left Waddinxveen on Onderweg, which is probably a great route, but we ended up detouring directly north, encountering impassable mazes along forest bike paths, and eventually getting directed to a bike route along the road to Boskoop. From there, we turned straight west on Hoogeveense Weg, then north on Provincialeweg to Hazerswoude-dorp and further to Hazerswoude-Rijndijk. This was fairly sparse territory for hotels, and we took a helpful native's advice and looked for Hotel Groenedijk on the Oude Rijn (Old Rhine). We seemed to be getting into tulip territory during high season, and we were lucky to find a room.
In the morning, we crossed the Oude Rijn on the bridge at Hazerswoude-Rijndijk and took a dedicated bike path called Matten Kade north-northwest to another path called Ruige Kade, working our way across country past Roelofarends Veen and up to Lisserweg, a quiet road through tulip-growing areas that leads into Lisse, home of the Keukenhof gardens. Tour buses were thick on the street as we passed Keukenhof, and the tulip, narcissus, and hyacinth fields were splendid. We headed for the town of Noordwijkerhout, where we were told there would be hotels. A stop in the local VVV office made it clear that this was not the time to be looking for a hotel on short notice, but we were referred to a delightful bed and breakfast at 4 Fazantlaan, with a garage that could hold our bikes. We left our luggage and rode back to Keukenhof. Bikes park free there. The display gardens were well worth the admission price. We had only a few hours, and it could take a couple days to see everything.
We rode through some more bulb-growing areas in the morning, but it was foggy. The North Sea Coast Bike Route is an amazing trail that circles the North Sea, running through Holland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Scotland, England, and back to Holland. There are several ferry crossings and it is enormously long. There are several BikeLine books (in German, but not hard to read the maps) with information about it. We used one of those and map 26 for this region, from Noordwijk to Hoek von Holland, where the bike route runs mostly through coastal dunes that are pleasantly hilly without being too strenuous. The biggest hazard for Cab-bikes was "Drempels." These are what Americans call "speed bumps," and I have heard that the British call them "sleeping policemen." They were in closely-spaced pairs, and the Cab-Bikes couldn't cross them without dragging. We had to go around or cross them diagonally. There was one set of "wildroosters." This was some sort of cattle grate for wild animals, perhaps to keep them out of someplace, and it was very noisy to cross. The North Sea was barely visible through the fog, and the path generally stayed behind the first row of dunes, which are strictly off-limits to protect their vegetation from erosion. These dunes protect Holland from the sea, so they have to be shielded from damage. At intervals along the coast, there were little resort towns, and the big city, Den Haag (The Hague). We had trouble finding our way through, ended up asking a lot of people for directions, and eventually found our way back to the dunes. At one point, as we stopped for a snack at a shopping center overlooking the North Sea, two groups of bicycle tourists with matching bike bags came pedaling past with their guides. We weren't sorry to be on our own in the countryside, but we could sure see how a guide could be useful in that city. The coastal path didn't offer any obvious places to stay, and we turned down the Nieuwe Waterweg toward Rotterdam before we came to a city that looked big enough to have a hotel. Maassluis used to be the major port for that part of Holland, before the New Waterway was completed to Rotterdam. Now, it's a fairly quiet little town. We headed for center and found Hotel Kreta. There was only a two-person room available, but there was no room at all in the other hotel in the area, and the staff at Kreta was willing to set up an extra mattress for us. They served a very nice Greek supper in their restaurant, and we had a pleasant walk through the town before bedtime. It's not a fancy place -- just a sink in the room and a bathroom down the hall, with the most amazingly steep stairways to the upper floors, but the people were very friendly, and the bike parking was secured by a gate. They served a generous breakfast and called the local newspaper to take pictures of the Cab-Bikes.
Our last trip was along the canal to Rotterdam. We used map 27, with a copyright date of 2000. There were several possible routes to the shipper in Waalhaven. We passed up the chance to cross on a car ferry from Maassluis to Rozenburg, though it offered the chance to take a side trip to the very scenic village of Brielle, and it appeared that the bike route along the south edge of the harbor district would be pretty good. Instead, we went to Vlaardingen and took a bike ferry across. It was a nice ferry, but just a little tight on the entry. It landed us between "1e Petroleumhaven" and "2e Petroleumhaven." Apparently the sight of three Cab-Bikes on the bike path in front of the biggest refineries in that part of Europe was irresistable. A free-lance television crew popped up along the path and interviewed us at length. We continued along a bike path that didn't show up on the map but had fortunately been completed parallel to the A-15. It allowed us to stop for lunch in Pernis (don't try the moving ramp/escalator for bikes to the bridge; there's a maze at the top that a Cab-Bike wouldn't fit through; the regular ramp is a better choice). Coming back to the bike path, we followed the signs to Rotterdam but stopped in Waalhaven on Albert Plesmanweg to drop off the Cab-Bikes for shipping by air to Minneapolis. We figured it was a good omen that the street was named for the founder of the Dutch airline KLM. The folks at Ocean-Trans were very nice to deal with. Our biggest difficulty was that they deal with cash, and the local banks wouldn't cash our traveler's checks. (We had gotten VISA traveler's checks instead of American Express, and only the exchange at the central railroad station was willing to cash them.) One of the staff gave us a ride to the Central Station, where we handled the check-cashing and were able to catch a train to Amsterdam. This gave us another chance to see the tulips, not as close as we could from the bikes, but a lot more of them.
For anyone thinking of doing this trip, we have a few suggestions.
Get good maps (1:50,000, with bike routes). A reasonable alternative to our route would be the lower Rhine bike route. There is one book that would cover the whole thing, from Mainz to Rotterdam, complete with lists of hotels that are known to be bike-friendly. It's from BikeLine and is called "Rhein-Radweg, Teil 3: Von Mainz nach Rotterdam." You can order it from www.amazon.de, which even "knows" all the data you might have stored in your account on amazon.com. The bikeway along the Rhine had too many cities for a group of three Cab-bikes, with one ridden by a relative novice at bike touring, but it might be fine for one person traveling alone. If you are traveling with someone else, arrange signals of some sort. We had wanted to bring "family radios" to keep in touch with each other, but the frequencies used for CB in the United States overlap with the river traffic frequencies in Holland and aren't allowed, so we made do with hand signals. It didn't always work.
Learn a little Dutch or at least bring a phrasebook if you are going off the main tourist routes. Despite what you may have heard, the Dutch don't all speak English. They are marvelously friendly, though, and they will happily speak Dutch to you -- even slowing down to give you a chance to understand some of it.