Our Holland Adventure - Part One......

We planned our first two week cycle tour to Holland for a number of reasons. Firstly, in two weeks you can only travel so far, and we wanted to have a holiday as well as testing out whether we could actually do this, or would actually enjoy it. Secondly, making arrangements to travel from Glasgow, we needed to cross the North Sea simply to get to our starting point, a journey which would knock off at least three days of our holiday before we’d even started. Finally and perhaps most importantly, both of us had cycled in Holland before and knew that the infrastructure for cyclists in the Netherlands was virtually perfect for our needs. Was there a need to look any further for our first trip? We thought not, so Holland it was!

With the North Sea crossing from Rosyth outside Edinburgh unfortunately no longer operating      ( hopefully someone will get this up and running again in the future ) our best option seemed to sail overnight with DFDS from Newcastle to Ijmuiden. We caught the train from Glasgow on the Saturday morning, and had already established that there was a dedicated cycle route from Newcastle Central to the ferry terminal about ten miles away. All bikes have to be booked onto the train to ensure you will get them on and luckily we managed to get tickets for ours at relatively short notice. There were more tickets for the bikes than for us and we were thankful that we had done this in advance as the cycle facilities on Virgin trains are mot great to say the least, Whoever designed the cycle racks on these trains obviously didn’t design them for our bikes as it was a struggle to get them into the woefully small area available. All panniers and attachments taken off we managed, just, but anyone else turning up to use the last remaining space would have had no chance of fitting their bike in!

Arriving in Newcastle we had plenty of time to head down to the waterfront, grab a relaxed lunch, and find the cycle route we needed. A fairly relaxed cycle of about 90 minutes got us safely to the ferry terminal on pretty good paths and we arrived with loads of time to spare. Queuing up behind the other cyclists and motorbikes we had plenty of time to compare gear and check out everyone else’s kit while we waited to get on the boat. There was a group of young German cyclists in front of us travelling with quite a lot of kit on rear panniers, and we wondered how they had got on in the UK with our not so cycle friendly roads. Thankfully it was dry as there was no where to wait under cover, as we waited for a good hour before going through passport control etc. Eventually, after loading quite a lot of cars and caravans, we were ushered onto the ferry’s upper deck, where we had to strap our bikes to a railing – quite difficult with a heavy bike on a sloping platform! – and eventually lugged all our panniers upstairs to our cabin.

After a good night’s sleep and a fantastic buffet feed, we arrived in windy but dry Ijmuiden at 9am the next morning. Doing the whole process in reverse we made it safely off the boat and, after remembering to cycle on the right, made our way out of the ferry terminal where we found our reassuring first cycle signs pretty quickly.

Being in Holland as a cyclist is pretty blissful on the whole. You can travel almost anywhere you like on dedicated separate cycle routes with their own signs and even traffic lights. All cars in Holland give way to bikes, which takes a bit of getting used to as it feels scary simply to cross the road and hope they’ll let you pass at first! During our whole trip we only found ourselves on the roads a couple of times, twice when we weren’t meant to be there and had cars flashing their lights at us an hitting their horns ( generally we hadn’t followed the signs and had missed the path and these were 60km/h roads where bikes are strictly NOT allowed! ). Everyone in Holland cycles, and I mean everyone, so there are bikes everywhere which also means you have to look out for them as well and not get in the way with your big tank of a touring bike! I personally found this a bit daunting for the first day or so, before I settled into the way of things, and being on car free routes meant we could really relax and enjoy the scenery around us.

Before we had set off, the weather forecast hadn’t looked too great, so we had prepared ourselves for staying in a mix of campsites, hostels and B&Bs along the way. Our research had thrown up three main options –

Nature Campsites (http://www.natuurkampeerterreinen.nl )

We aren’t into big sites with loads of facilities and ‘entertainment’, preferring to stick to more basic quieter sites. We had discovered a network of 140 small basic 'nature camping' sites, ( not to be confused with naturist sites, of which there are quite a few in the Netherlands! )offering the chance to get away from the more organised kind, in rural areas out of town. They were generally a lot cheaper then the more formal advertised ones, and seemed to be just what we were looking for. Ideal for cyclists, most are situated on or near cycle routes, and are generally in areas of natural beauty away from the main towns. To stay in these sites you need to pay a fee of 15 Euros for a card and ( v small  and compact) guide book, which you can easily buy at your first stop. Charges are per tent/caravan and then per person, and we generally found ourselves paying in the region of 11-15 Euros a night which was pretty reasonable given that we also got free hot showers when the larger more formal sites charge for these or require you to buy tokens.

Hostels ( http://stayokay.com )

Holland’s answer to the Youth Hostel, Stay Okay operates 28 hostels throughout the country, offering dorm or group accommodation. A bit more pricey than UK hostels ( anything up to 28 Euros pp per night ), the other downside is that they don’t offer facilities for cooking your own food, but we though this was an option if things got too bad weather wise, or if we just fancied a night in a proper bed!

B&B ( http://vriedenopdefeits.nl )  

The “Vrienden op de Fiets" guide for 2011 contains nearly four thousand addresses throughout Holland and Belgium. These addresses provide bed and breakfast for cyclist and hikers only, with the nightly cost not exceeding 19 Euros per person. We had sent off for the book online before we left the UK. Once again an option for us if the weather go too wet.

Holland is conveniently covered by a vast network of cycle routes, with a wide variety to choose from. To be honest you could land in the country without any map and pretty easily find your way around using the local ‘red signage’, routes that point you in the direction of a nearby town. These are easy to follow and we used them several times on our rest days to navigate about. Alternatively there are long distance routes, or those taking you on specific routes of natural or historical interest in specific areas. Lastly there are the ‘nodes’, a vast network of numbered signs, linking up in a huge web across the whole country, allowing you to plan your route more accurately, and this seemed perfect for us although locals don’t seem to use these at all. Maps showing all the nodes are readily available on line or at book stores or Tourist Information shops ( VVV ), however, like Ordinance Survey maps in the UK, you require quite a number at 8Euros a time to cover the whole country. We had downloaded an Android App for our phones called ‘Bikenode’ before we left, which shows you all the nodes on a google map, and distances between each node, so we thought we rely on this to plan our routes as we went along.  Bikenode shows all the available routes, long distance, local and the node network, and also allows you handy views of each node point in Google Earth which is handy is you get lost and want to check where you should be.

( https://market.android.com/details?id=nl.rulex.bikenode&hl=en )

Generally it worked very well. At the start of each day we’d check the map and plan our route, writing down the list of numbers or nodes we’d have to follow to get to our destination. At pretty much every second node there is a map where you can check that you’re on the right track, and for the most part the nodes are quite easily spotted once your eye is trained to look out for the small but regular green and white signs.

‘Bikenode’ served us well, although we did miss out on a couple of nodes every now and then, and learned to check the maps at the nodes pretty regularly in case we took a wrong turn. The nodes are pretty easy to spot and follow when in the countryside, but less so in towns, where we got lost a couple of times. Generally however the only times we got well and truly lost was where there were roadworks or diversions, however a bit of common sense ( and a compass ) soon put us on the right track again.  Friendly locals were quick to stop and try to help us out, but seemed a bit flummoxed with the nodes as they don't really use them much to get about. Asking them ‘Can you tell us which way to get to number 47?’  didn’t get us far most of the time, but we managed fairly well for the most part.

To be fair some people like having a map in front of them, and if you haven’t got a phone able to download ‘Bikenode’ or similar, you would certainly need one, but we opted for the free version and didn’t get lost all that often….but hey isn’t getting lost on holiday meant to be half the fun?