Day 13: Zandvoort, Netherlands

June 16, 2013 (Happy Father's Day, Dads!!!)

Today we planned to rent bikes, bike out to the coast (about an hour and a half according to google), have a picnic lunch, look around the beach and bike back to Amsterdam. That was the plan....but when you are on a trip things don't usually go according to plan.

We got up, ate breakfast (toast and an egg), packed our backpack with our food and set off to the bike shop to rent bikes. We rented two for two days (17 Euro a day with insurance) so we could ride around tomorrow too. The bikes had narrower handlebars and turned sharper than usual so they took some getting used to. We got the basic bikes so there were no gears and only back brakes, but the woman assured us it should be fine since Holland only has hills in the south and we were heading east. After some practice in front of the shop, we took off and joined the "real" bikers on the road. It was a pretty crazy start, basically a sink or swim experience getting out of Amsterdam. There were people, bikes, and cars everywhere and you had to watch all the lights and figure out who was yielding to whom which made it feel quite chaotic for people not used to it. Eventually we did make it out of the crowded part of the city by following all the main biking roads that headed east. We stayed on the biking road than ran along with the a large highway going into Amsterdam. It probably took us about 45 minutes to get out of Amsterdam alone. It is a large city and seemed to just keep going.

 Eventually we stopped to look at a map, because we knew eventually we had to turn. Once we did, we realized just how wrong our perspective had been. We had been going for about an hour and we hadn't even reached the first city outside of Amsterdam. We went on for about 30 more minutes and finally made it to Halfweg (which was not halfway). By this point I had started hating every minute of it and we were both starting to realize how much we had idealized this trip. It sounded so nice to bike to a beach to have lunch, but the practicality of it wasn't there. We decided that we wanted to reach our end goal (the beach) even if we changed how we did it, so we went on into town and bought a train ticket the rest of the way out to the coast. We took our picnic lunch and locked our bikes up at the train station.

On the train, we got out our map and found the key. We now realized how much we underestimated this journey. When we looked on Google maps, it said that it was 1 1/2 hours by bike, so we thought, "Oh that's do-able" but didn't bother to convert the distance from km (that's what they measure in here) to miles. It turns out that it is 20 miles from Amsterdam to the coast! Apparently Google was estimating for an Olympic biker. So two people that on average run 1 mile at a time (he runs 2 and I run 0) set out on a 40 mile roundtrip bike ride. No wonder we didn't make it! To our credit, Halfweg where we caught the train was 8 miles from Amsterdam, so we had an 8 mile bike ride.

It is not nearly as hot here as it is in Kentucky, only averaging 68 as the high in June. We have been wearing pants and long sleeves since we got here so we knew visiting the beach here wouldn't be like visiting Myrtle Beach. We wore pants and tennis shoes and didn't even consider a bathing suit. However, whatever we were expecting was definitely exceeded. The beach had really strong winds making it quite cold. We sat on the beach to eat our sandwiches, but by the end was eating a lot of sand. We walked around the beach and I collected shells, but that's about all we could stand to do. We spent about an hour there before we decided we had enough of Netherland beaches. We took the train back to Halfweg, got out bikes, and then took the train on into Amsterdam because we were both "saddle sore" and didn't think we could endure 8 miles back.

It looks MUCH pettier than it was

Our picnic lunch. Yes, Barbecue Ham flavored chips. No, they're not good.

There are you average Netherland beach-goers: Tennis shoes, jackets, hoods up and still looking cold

They had a tractor that pulled a concession cart.
The yellow things were used  to  hide behind to get out of the wind.

Clayton said this face described the day! 

My Indian headband I had bought to keep my ears from aching.  My hair after our hour on the beach.

We got back to the boat about 6 which is earlier than usual. We decided what the last things we wanted to see tomorrow in Amsterdam, made salami pizza that we got at the grocery yesterday, and are about to go watch a chick-flick (Just Like Heaven) in bed and call it an early night. After so much adventuring, we wanted a night in before a full day tomorrow and then London on Tuesday. We had a great day and learned many things today: check the mileage before you leave, don't trust Google estimations for bikes, you shouldn't eat sandwiches on the beach and we are not long distance bike-riders!