Lomas de Limburg - Day 2

Breakfast on our terrace and Mevrouw Nicholaes joined us for a chat. She said she was going to sell the place. She herself did not ride a bike around here: too steep. We also chatted with her gawky and friendly husband Hubertus.

Lomas de Limburg - Day 1

And now we're in Belgium. Well, literally spitting distance from Holland, and our vriend op de fiets, Wiell Nicholaes, is from Haarlem. The countryside here is lovely if unspectacular, not unlike the hills of New Jersey. From Wiell's garden we see gently sloping fields and to the northeast a wooded mountain, which must be the Vijlenerbos, "the largest contiguous deciduous forest of Limburg."

Return to the Veluwe

Apeldoorn is just an hour east of Amsterdam but the nearby Hoge Veluwe national park feels quite remote. It is the same swath of forest and heath that I described in Rondje Veluwe a couple of years ago. This time my girlfriend Alice and I took a two-day journey from Apeldoorn through the forest.

Return to Groningen

Sunday morning: we're at a cafe right on Schiermonnikoog beach and it's cleared up. With the wind blocked by glass panels it's fairly warm. A long strip of beach on the open sea. Kite flying and sail racing. After having our coffee we continued to explore the network of packed sand paths through the dunes. It being a clear, lovely Sunday in late summer, we had plenty of company.

Groningen / Schiermonnikoog - Day 2

View from the hide, Lauwersmeer national park

In the morning, we said goodbye to Dick and Flora and went up the road to Zoutkamp, with a little harbor. From there, we skirted the Lauwersmeer, a man-made lake that's at the center of a national park. Not too spectacular, just a large expanse of grass. We found a bird "hide" and looked at some swallows hopping along the bank of a pond where cows lazed. The hut had wooden boards for shutters and you lift them to open a slit in the structure, presumably unseen by the birds. At the entrance we ran into a Belgian birder who showed videos of an owl that later attacked him. Other solitary men carrying telescopes and cameras wandered past.

Groningen / Schiermonnikoog - Day 1

New paths, Groningen

The beautiful town of Groningen, tucked away in Holland's northeast, quite close to Germany. The plan is to head for the island of Schiermonnikoog, easternmost of the Frysian isles, which form a crescent-shaped barrier to the North Sea. We rented identical Gazelle Orange bikes at the train station (€8.50 per day). Then we crossed the ring canal and headed north, got fried fish at the Vismarkt, made an espresso stop at Black & Bloom, run by a coffee maven who "really knows his stuff" according to my cycling companion Brian Jones. We were sitting outside sipping our espressos, me observing the cheerful passersby on foot, bike and scooter, Brian on the phone to London. Another gorgeous summer's day.