Day Ten: Zwolle to Apeldoorn: (Year 10: 1977)

September 30, 2017

With changing governments, support for the Winnipeg Mincome project dried up. I got recruited by the government of British Columbia for a new statistics agency that had been formed there. That triggered the final cross continent move of this story. We bundled the kids and baby Jeremy into a U-Haul truck, selling our house on Scott street for the fabulous sum of $32,000 - $12,000 more than the buying price.

We were a little glum on the trip, maybe because the move was more forced than planned. On the other hand, we knew Vancouver Island was a great place, from the bike trip the year before.

Things really turned around when we got onto the ferry from Vancouver. The Gulf Islands and Salish Sea are a wonderful natural environment, with much more interest than the pleasant but flat, agricultural prairies. On the ferries, book racks had coverage of the marine environment and cultural heritage of the coast, launching us there with a lot of optimism and enthusiasm. Trucking through Vancouver, though, we noticed our first specialty umbrellas only store - a reminder that this verdant rain forest features much ... rain!

1977 was the year we moved to the West Coast. We felt instantly at home among the big trees and ocean islands. In fact we put up a tent and "forgot" for a while to report to our arranged jobs.

Donovan catch the wind

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We have decided that rooms with included breakfast really are the gold standard in hotels. I expressed it to Dodie as "gives me a reason to wake up". She indignantly responded that it is the day's wonderful cycling that makes her wake up. Notwithstanding, when we found that our booking at the Bastion hotel in Apeldoorn did not include breakfast, we were both upset. We phoned booking.com and complained that we had been misled. We will put that story and more things we know or don't know about booking into a forum post, sometime soon.

See the green box that says "Breakfast included" - not exactly!

Meanwhile we much enjoyed the breakfast at our Zwolle B&B, including talking to the lovely staff. We did not take much of a spin around Zwolle, for the simple reason that once we have someplace to go, we like to just get on with it.

The Sassenpoort, a remaining original gate in Zwolle.

Look Dave, do we have this type of Lego at home?

Bike storage near the Zwolle train station. This is just a few of all the bikes!

Travelling now as yesterday seemed to rely more on the knooppunt system than on city to city direction signs. We did supplement this with our gpx track, when either lost or when the knooppunts did not seem to lead exactly where we wanted to go.

Now that we are out of Friesland and into Gelderland, the nature of the land seems a little different. Gone are the vast, expansive dairy farms and huge farm houses. Rather we have more mixed agriculture and a little denser villages. Traffic also seemed a little heavier, though still extremely light. We were still either on separate bike paths, or maybe a little more of bike lanes beside roads.

Dodie spotted a Spar market and dove in for a little bit of stuff, leaving me outside with the bikes. In my time standing outside I noticed people cycling up, often with very expensive ebikes, and leaving them, just with locking the café lock. Clearly even in Netherlands there are safer and less safe places to park your bike. was also a lady of East Indian extraction standing out front with some sort of newspaper on offer. During my time, she made no sales.

Dodie came out with quite a lot of good looking stuff, having spent only 10 euros. There were tomatoes, a nice salad, apples, rice pudding, and two packages of snack biscuits. Amazing.

We continued along, often following canals, and at one point using a bike ferry to cross what was either a large canal or small river. It was kind of a lot of turning and twisting - crossing roads, jumping from point to point, rather than being on a long unique path and just pedalling.

A lot of todays ride was actually straight canal side.

At one point we needed this ferry. Such ferries here cost one euro.

The Classens have recently mentioned the "Canadian Gates" in France. Here, they are called wild roosters!

Knoppers are our favourite anti-bonk cookies. We have even had people bring them from Europe for us. But here we will also experiment with Speculoos.

Bill Shaneyfelt, should we put this in our stir fry?

Much of today;s ride was sort of on road, like this. But traffic is sparse.

These swans were very successful parents this year. One baby is starting to turn white as well.

The situation was, or should have been, totally safe. But, about 7 km from Appeldoorn we came to a totally routine spot where the bike path crossed a road. That is one of dozens in a day. Dodie took a look left and right and started off. But she had not seen a blue VW coming from the right, at quite smart rate of speed. It might have been obscured by trees, or maybe bushes.

Dodie almost made it by, in front of the VW, but it hit her fairly squarely with its right front side. She flew up and over the car, landing on the grass. The bicycle was thrown forward of that, landing in the grass about 20 feet down the road.

I watched this unfold in horror, and assumed that this was the end for Dodie. After all, hit head on by a car at speed! Amazingly, and before either of us could totally freak, Dodie reported that she was basically ok. That was really a miracle.

The car driver, Rene, of course stopped, as did a lady and her friend who were in the next car along. We all set about collecting up Dodie, the bike, and all the contents of Dodie's handlebar bag - which were strewn on the crash and in the bushes over a 10 foot area.

Oh, I did not mention that it had been raining all morning, and all this happened in the rain.

At first, though the bike was a mess, I assumed that it was just all its folding features that had folded. But on straightening things out it was clear that the frame had taken a hit for Dodie, and was dead.

Dodie herself could now assess things a bit more, and reported a fairly massive haematoma on one thigh, plus a cut to the ankle. More bruises did appear later.

We wanted to call an ambulance, but Dodie felt she would be ok. So we (Rene) called the police. Clearly their help would be needed in several ways - to report on the circumstances and the damages, but also to scrape us out of the street and the rain and get us to somewhere safe.

The police took a bit of time to appear, so we all stood around in the rain, until the lady from that second car put Dodie inside it.

The police arrived - two lovely officers. Their first move was to call an ambulance. A checkup by the ambulance crew would be needed to decide if Dodie and I were riding to hospital, leaving the bikes and gear to some other solution, or whether a taxi could be summoned to drag the whole mess to our hotel.

The ambulance arrived and took Dodie inside for a check out. The giant bruise will be painful, but nothing else seemed seriously broken or smooshed. The police tried calling a taxi to takes our whole show into Apeldoorn, but none could take the bikes.

Here is where the police did something that maybe we would not have seen at home. They went to the nearest house and told the people they (we) needed help. They arranged for the people to stash our bikes in their garage until we would manage to return and retrieve them.

Of course we all exchanged ID and contact info all around. We will hear from Rene soon again, because his car is damaged. The lady in the second car gave us her phone number, in case we need further help. The police gave us their card, and preliminary report notes, etc. etc.

Then the police called a regular taxi, and installed us in the kitchen with the people from the house. The people made us coffee and cookies, while waiting for the taxi. When the taxi arrived, the people in the house invited the driver, Bert, for coffee as well. This is the Netherlands, eh. One good side effect of all this is that I finally got to be inside one of those Dutch houses that I want to take home. It was lovely, and immaculately clean.

Bert took us to the hotel, the one where we had been peeved about the breakfast plan. It also happened that this one, the only one we spotted online last night, was three or four star and fairly costly. Now, we are happy about it because we are in a very huge and comfortable room with good internet. We are going to need that to get the show back on the road, over the next few days.

Tomorrow, Bert will go with a bigger vehicle and retrieve the bikes. Then we have to package up the dead Friday and send it home in a box, followed by finding a bike store and buying another folder. All bike shops here are closed tomorrow and Monday. Maybe those Grampies who never stop in a town will finally get a closer look at one!

Remains of Dodie. You can see in this photo the extent to which Dodie was separated from her bike. The blue car is where it finally stopped after slamming on the brakes. Other things to note: Dodie is lying by a "knooppunt" sign from the ultra safe Dutch system. You can also see Dodie modelling her new RainLegs rain pants.

Rene helps to collect the bike from the bushes.

Handlebar bag contents needed to be retrieved. In the end Dodie found her notebook was missing. More than anything else that has happened, she is exercised about this. The book had notes on costs, hits, weather, etc, from some of our last trips and this one.

Dodie and Rene comfort each other. This event was traumatic for Rene as well. His car also had one mirror ripped off.

The intersection, and the nice people's house on the other side.

Trees and bushes that obscured the view.

The nearby house where the police correctly assumed help could be found.

Today's ride: 35 km (22 miles)
Total: 408 km (253 miles)

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