Friesland

It’s 9pm and I’m already in bed, ready to read a few chapters of my book and then go to sleep. Today was the first day of the bike ride. We rode for 6-7 hours, a good portion of it along the dikes next to the sea. Talk about head wind! We were expecting it to rain for a lot of the day, and the first hour or so was a miserable torrential downpour, but after that we had a blue sky with a slight breeze. Though I can’t really feel my butt and am a little sunburned, I still had a great day. I was worried that by the end of today I would be dreading the rest of the week, but I’m really looking forward to it (just not how sore I’m going to be when we start riding tomorrow morning).

The landscape is much more varied than I expected—there are some cute little villages and forest paths thrown in with the never ending pastures of cows, horses, goats, and thousands of sheep. We’ve also biked by a bunch of windmills, but they’re mostly the industrial white kind, not the cute wooden kind. It gets a little monotonous at times, but I’ve astounded myself with the number of songs I know the lyrics to and can sing in my head. Plus, it’s a constant challenge to make sure we are following the right path.

This is a very specific route, which goes around most of Friesland. There is a very famous ice skating race, the Elfstedentocht, along the canals in Friesland that goes through 11 towns, so in the summer there is a bike race that takes a slightly different route, but also goes to each of the towns. We’re not racing, obviously, but we’re doing that route. We have a page with a space for each of the town halls to stamp that we were there, and if we get all of them we get a certificate. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling this to whoever is reading my blog, but I’m a sucker for certificates, so that’s pretty good motivation in itself to complete the tour.

Today we got to the first town, only to find out that the town hall was closed on Mondays. Disaster! Luckily a man walking his dog came up to us as we were biking through the town and, after a short conversation, we mentioned our disappointment at not getting the stamp. By lucky coincidence, he happened to have the keys to the local church and said they also had the stamp there so he would let us in and give them to us. I reitterate: everybody here is so friendly!

That’s all for now. I’m about to have the heaviest sleep I’ve had in a long time:-)