I´m writing this post from a really smart Youth hostel in Mµnster. Like everything else on the trip the surroundings are unbelievably civillised although I´m increasingly feeling quite the opposite.
The distances are huge and yesterday was a rollcoaster, elated at crossing into Germany but arriving in Mµnster at 9.30pm having ridden another 120 mile day and my body starting to complain about doing back to back centuries on a fixed gear with luggage!
Holland and Germany are a cycling paradise with almost no need to share carriageways with cars even on main roads. Yesterday, I blitzed the last 25 miles on the cycling lane alongside one of the main routes into the city at 20plus miles/hour - it was like riding a two lane motorway for cyclists.
Everyone here either rides sit-up-and-beg bikes at a gentle pace or are trying to emulateemulate Tom Boonen, glowering at you from behind wrap round shades in team kit and on carbon fibre road bikes. Doesn't seem like there is any middle ground!
Holland was surprsingly beautiful - possibly the most immaculate countryside and towns I have ever witnessed. We went there last year camping but rather whizzed through on the way to the North German coast. At this more leisurely (?) pace I was treated to mile after mile of brick built, thatched farmhouses with animals grazing on neat pastures alongside arrow straight waterways. Every scene looked like someone had arranged it for decorative effect.
When I was feeling on less of a high, I wondered what sinister things were really going on behind those pretty brick windows.
One a minor note - there is a very weird ratio of shops in Dutch and German towns´- there are about ten times as many chemists, opticians and hardware shops as there are any other shops. Also, coming from England, it is odd to be somewhere where all of the shops seem to be closed for most of the day.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment