Many years ago I shared an apartment in Paris with a little Korean-American girl named Erica, who was the tiniest bit naïve. When I returned from a weekend in Amsterdam, I told her how I rented a bike and rode out into the countryside. \"What was it like?\" she asked. I told her it was full of tulips and windmills and dikes, to which she replied with horror, \"Mean ones?\" Apparently her only contact with dikes were of the militant Yale variety found in New Haven. In any case, we spent much of today riding on dikes again; we were bikes on dikes.
This morning was like waking up on another planet. The sun was shining and everything was green and glorious, and we realized with glee that a strong wind would blow us all the way to Amsterdam. After a long and leisurely breakfast with our new friends John and Nellie, we made it to Brielle --yesterday's goal---in record time. Brielle is a charming an interesting old town, heavily fortified by star-shaped city walls, with a network of canals lined by old crooked houses. We stopped long enough for incredibly awesome strawberry tarts at a salon de thé. After a couple of failed attempts, we found our way out of town, crossing a bridge over one channel of Europort/Rotterdam (the world's largest) and then a ferry across another.
I was thrilled to see that most of the traffic on the ferry was other fietsers, and the steady stream of container-laden vessels was quite a sight. The ride to Delft was fifteen kilometers of pedaling perfection. The wind was right at our backs, allowing us to cruise along at an effortless 30 kilometers per hour, along canals, past windmills and fields of flowers. Everywhere we looked bicycles were part of the landscape. The locals pedaled lazily along on their hulking black beasts, many of them wearing a distinctly self-satisfied smiles. Are the Netherlands a utopia for bikes? I think so.
Delft was bustling from the frenzy of consumerism than constitutes Market Day. It looked like an attractive little town --sort of a mini Amsterdam--- but the jam-packed streets and squares made me feel a little claustrophobic. While munching on a sandwich on the crowded market square, Fred said he felt like training the remaining 60 or 70 km to Amsterdam. At first I thought I'd bike up, but the idea sounded too tempting, and soon we were on our way to the train station. The place was a mess due to an accident on the rails (which we later learned was two trains hitting each other head on near Leiden).
We had to be rerouted through Rotterdam, tripling the length of what would normally have been a 30-minute journey. Still, it was nice to be able to take an agouti nap and eavesdrop on the Britannic glamour princess cutting decorating deals over her cell phone in the seat behind me. She sounded just like Edina on \"Absolutely Fabulous.\" Unloading my bike off the train at Centraal Station, I was engulfed by a huge cloud of marijuana smoke on the platform. Yes, we had made it to Amsterdam. I led the way through busy streets to where I thought brother Marty's hotel was and we found the place without a problem.
Mars and Siri showed up shortly after we got settled, full of stories from their own road trip from Aix-en-Provence and up through Switzerland and Germany. The distance they had covered in so little time seemed unfathomable to me, and then I remembered one of the advantages of motorized transport. We had another rijstafel dinner at a popular place across the street. While the food was far superior to our meal in Antwerp, none of our servers was in drag. Nevertheless, drag is what we did to Marty and Siri after our meal, to a trendoid queer café called Havana. We snagged a big round booth there and consumed multiple beers and talked about everything and everyone while our young bespectacled waiter flirted shamelessly with Fred.
Later, it felt luxurious knowing that the next day there wouldn't be any riding to do, and that we had nothing planned. It felt almost like a vacation...