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?

Dumfries and Galloway cycle trip June 2011 - Day 1

With our trip to Orkney confirmed for the end of June, we had been looking for an opportunity to test the bikes and kit out on a three day camping trip. The weather having been so dismal on the last Bank Holiday weekend in May, we decided on a cycle between Stranraer and Dumfries in Dumfries and Galloway in south west Scotland. This trip would take us three days, a journey of approximately 115 miles, so a Monday holiday was booked and we were all set. The weather forecast didn’t look too great but our theory was that it would ‘test our mettle’ and really give us an idea of what a trip like this could throw at us. As the wind direction was set to blow from the east we decided to give ourselves a fighting chance and travel west from Dumfries to Stranraer. Faced with the prospect of showers and some pretty prolonged climbs this seemed like the best plan to keep the wind at our backs as much as possible.


Saturday 4th June - Dumfries to Ross ( 38 miles )

Dedicated cycle space on the train!

Slightly bleary eyed, we set off for Dumfries by train at 7am on the Saturday morning. The train was tiny, only two carriages, but had a dedicated cycle area to the rear ( for up to 6 bikes ) where we could hang our bikes up.
With the bikes duly strapped in we settled down for the two hour journey. Arriving in Dumfries we quickly got everything off the train (thankfully the train was pretty quiet but was continuing its route onwards to Newcastle), checked the maps, and headed down towards the river to pick up the cycle route (National Cycle Route 7). We got a few cheery waves from some road cyclists out for their Saturday run, and found the signs for the route without too much difficulty.

Route 7 takes you along minor roads, this one an old Military Road, all the way from Dumfries to our first real stop at Castle Douglas. The countryside is pretty rural with rolling hills, which tested out tired morning legs but gave us regular freewheeling opportunities which were much appreciated! At some point on this leg, my bike stand decided to shear off completely, leaving me with no option but to lean my heavy bike against a wall etc for the rest of the trip. Note to self – look at buying a Pletscher twin leg stand when I get back.

There had to be at least 1000 calories
in this piece of cake!

By the time we reached Castle Douglas the clouds had cleared to give us patches or warm sunshine, so we decided on a coffee stop where Al managed to consume single handily a calorie laden piece of cake. Think ‘Death by Chocolate’ filled with slightly salty runny tablet, and then covered in single cream! God knows how many grams of fat it contained but skinny ones like him can afford to eat this kind of stuff. Even on a cycle trip this would have made me put on a couple of pounds instantly.


Castle Douglas is a lovely wee market town, and well worth a visit if you like individual and quirky wee shops, particularly good for jewellery and house wares etc. It also has a pretty good cycle shop, and a Tesco which you pass on the way into town if you’re needing to stock up. On this occasion we weren’t stopping to shop, so headed on towards Kirkudbright on the coast, roughly another 15 miles away.

Once again the roads were really quiet and our reward for a fairly long climb was a lovely descent through almost ‘tropical’ woods down into the town itself. Dumfries and Galloway really is big tree country and is beautifully lush at this time of year.


Our second pit stop of the day saw us now sitting in bright warm sunshine for half an hour, eating a sausage supper on a park bench ( lovely! ) and unhappily burning our peely-wally Scottish legs in the process. Scotland’s sunshine isn’t really that warm but it taught us a lesson that sunscreen should always be applied even if you think it’s not that hot! Kirkudbright, which we’ve visited before, is also worth spending an afternoon in.

Fishing boats at the harbour, and plenty of little art galleries give this small artists town a faintly bohemian air. We sat and watched kids excitedly catching crabs on the harbour front before heading off to the ubiquitous Tesco to stock up on supplies for dinner and breakfast the next morning.

Heading for Ross bay before we had to turn back!

Our destination was a campsite south of Kirkudbright, continuing on via the minor coast road. I had seen this site on the internet and thought it sounded ideal. Reaching it involved a run down a long hill, by a single track road which I couldn’t imagine anyone taking a caravan along with any ease. When we reached the site we were reliably informed by the slightly offhand owner that it was open to Caravan and Camping Club members only, and that we could only stay if we paid the annual membership fee of £39.50!! Al and I have been camping for years and have never, ever had to join this to find a decent site, in fact any camper worth his or her salt wouldn’t bother as there are plenty of lovely sites in Scotland to choose from without resorting to these kind of archaic rules. So our answer was a swift no thanks, and we headed off back up the hill towards the next one. This site’s restrictions seemed like commercial suicide to me, and I wouldn’t have wanted arrive with my caravan only to have to turn round and head back as we did.


Eventually we found the ‘Holiday Park’ at Brighouse Bay about a mile or two further on. Crossing fingers we went into reception and luckily they took tents and had plenty of space for us. As a rule we try to avoid these kinds of places, preferring to go for the more basic ones where you really feel you’re getting away from everyday life. That said this site was lovely. Well landscaped areas hid the fact that you were staying on a huge site, and our pitch was fairly sheltered and came with a handy picnic table, perfect when you’re on a bike. Our only gripe was that it cost £21 for the night which we thought was a bit steep for a tiny tent and two bikes. The chap at reception said they were trying to encourage cyclists, and I nearly said that lowering their prices would be a good place to start.

Our tent was up and pitched in minutes ( more on the tent tomorrow night ) and after a wee walk to stretch our bike legs we got tea on the go. In hindsight risotto on a tiny gas stove on a breezy campsite was perhaps not the best idea! We used up way too much gas, and it took an absolute age to cook, but you live and learn, and it was at least very tasty when it was finally finished! We climbed into our sleeping bags at about 10pm after a few beers and slept snugly for about 10 hours, despite the overnight temperature dropping to about 6 degrees. I'm sure there's a knack to sleeping in these small tents that I'll get used to eventually.....