And we're off!

After several hours of packing and getting our apartment packed away, we finally left our house at noon!

So far our ride has been fairly flat and along set bike routes.

Yesterday we cycled with our friend Alex through the rain from Dinslaken to Duisburg (we started in Wesel), eventually giving up cold and soaking wet after about 50km. We spent the rest of the afternoon in a city museum with an exhibition on Mercator (the guy who figured out navigation), then decided to take the train to Alex's place in Dusseldorf for the night. After drying off, we'll be cycling back up to Essen, to stay with people that we met travelling on our last trip. Essen is about the same distance north as Duisburg so we'll essentially be covering the same distance that we skipped by train yesterday!

Its the Final Countdown...

The last few days have flown by. We had our last days at work, cleaned out our apartment, had goodbye parties with friends and colleagues, somehow finding time to finish building a kayak and going to triathlon practice. Yesterday, the whole country partied together for Koninginnedag and Marieke´s brother and his girlfriend have just arrived for a few days in Holland!
  

 (One of Marieke's colleagues made chocolate bicycles as a goodbye present!)

We´re pretty much ready to hit the road on Thursday, so next time we post we'll probably be somewhere in Germany. 

Last Trip Before the Trip

With only two and half weeks left to go before we leave, we took our touring bikes out for one last spin. This time, we headed west towards Den Haag to spend the weekend with our friends Adeline and Edgar. We kicked off the weekend with Ad and Ed's annual joint birthday party in the city centre. After a relaxed morning and a trip to the grocery store for some lunch supplies, the of us headed off fora day of cycling. It was a chilly day, but sunny and wonderful for cycling.
We rode north through forests, past enormous estates, through dunes and along the coast, stopping for a late lunch.

(no we didn't all plan to wear red!)
We continued along to Noordwijk, heading inland towards the famous tulips fields, which we were determined not to miss this year!

At some point one of us spotted "Aardbeien", so stopped to indulge in some heavenly early local strawberries.

As the sun started to set, we rode the last few kilometres back to our friends' place.

Tired, but rejuvenated by an amazing day of cycling, we sat down to very well-earned meal of Chinese take-away. A few of us (not mentioning any names), gobbled down numerous plates, attempting to satiate a cycler's appetite and simultaneously carb load for Rotterdam Marathon 10km race the following day.
The next morning, we work up early and joined the masses of people for the race. Despite having forgotten to register, we managed to get to the start line and run the entire race, including running through the finish line, without getting noticed. We even got participant medals, which we attempted to avoid but essentially got lassoed around our necks by eager and friendly volunteers! After a very cold trip back to Den Haag and hot showers, we headed back to Utrecht, tired but content after a very fun and active weekend!

Cleaning and Organising

No, it's not really the most exciting or glamourous of activities that one associates with planning a bike touring trip...But, with only three (!) weeks left to go before our trip, we figured that we should at least start getting our apartment ready for subletters. So, closets and cupboards got emptied, winter clothes got boxed away and the kitchen got a pretty good scrub. Since we're still here for three weeks, we'll need to do this again in our last week, but it was a good start!

Test Pack

This past weekend we set out with the goal of trying out our bikes fully loaded, including a night of camping. We set off from Utrecht around 5pm and rode west towards Amersfoort along bike paths, through countryside and forests, reaching a campsite two hours later just before dark.

We had called the campsite the day before to check to see if they were open. The man who answered the phone had been a bit abrupt and had said that there were a bunch of Brits staying at the site and that we might not want to stay there. I finally convinced the man that we didn't really care as long as there was room for a tent. Upon arriving at the site, we figured out what the man had meant - the campsite was full of British temporary workers and their families. We were given a tiny scrap of grass between all of the caravans and trailers on which to pitch a tent. We definitely attracted the attention of a few of the worker's kids who were curious about why we were sleeping in the tent and how it was that we got there by bicycle.

Despite the less than idyllic surroundings, our trial camping night with our new equipment went off without a hitch. The night felt a lot less cold than we thought it would be and our equipment setup seemed to work well.

The next day we set off around 10am, cycling 95km towards Zwolle into the wind and drizzle. It wasn't exactly the most pleasant of rides, but it definitely gave us good impression about riding fully loaded bikes! We finally arrived at our friends Eliska and Francois's apartment in Zwolle in the evening. We had a lot of fun that evening, chatting until the wee hours of the morning! Surprising after a long day of cycling! The next morning we woke up late, had a leisurely breakfast and took the train back to Utrecht. Overall a good test!

Checking Things Off Our List

We haven't posted anything for a while mostly because we didn't have much (positive) progress on our trip planning. Until this week we hadn't sorted what exactly we were going to do with our apartment.

When we got permission from our landlord to sublet our place, we assumed that it would be super easy to find someone. Our apartment has a ton of things going for it namely, location, location, location not to mention its relatively big size (for a Dutch apartment). But after weeks of posting and reposting ads on various roomfinding websites and classified websites we still had no good leads. Would we find someone? Or would we have to give up our apartment, put all of our stuff in storage and then have to go through the ever laborious task of finding a new place when we got back? Well after changing our tactics slightly, we have signed contracts with subletters!

Now we can finally get back to actual trip planning and fun things like buying the last bit of gear!

New journey

We've decided to head out on another trip, so it's time to revive this old blog.

This time our plan is to bike from Holland to Turkey, roughly following the route below. The map is broken up into monthly sections (click to see where we'll be when). We'll start the journey in May, and hopefully be in Istanbul by August...

Part two of our bike trip will take us back to Canada for a fall tour of Ontario and Quebec (no route yet planned).


View Rough Route - Europe in a larger map

Local windmill

This windmill is located a few blocks from our place. It was once a lumber mill, and it still works (open to visitors on Saturdays). Just another reason for you to come visit Utrecht.