May 23, 2025
Holland's lesser-known glory
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I’M FEELING less guilty today. I know cycle-touring is relaxation rather than racing, exploration and not excess, but I have been feeling inadequate. We knew when we left that we wouldn’t – indeed couldn’t – cover bottom-bashing distances. We hadn’t ridden much in months and the legs weren’t there. Nevertheless, pride comes into this and to finish the day with such little distance behind us has felt… well, as I said, inadequate.
I am inadequate, of that there is no dispute. But I, both of us, haven’t been reluctant to stop and look at things. We have studied forts even though I haven’t mentioned them. And I haven’t mentioned them, frankly, because there’s often not much there and, as giggling girls have said of male strippers, once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.
And why do I feel less inadequate? Because our neighbour at the farm campground was a cyclist from 60km north of London and the accent from south of it. We made each other feel better by moaning. The trees were giving up. Twigs and leaves flew through the air. I had seen birds zigzagging, I insisted.
Our new friend smiled the smile of the guilty.
“I got riding with a Dutch guy”, he said, “and we were both moaning about the wind. And then he said ‘Why don’t we just catch a train? We don’t have to do all this.' And so that’s what we did.”
Because of that, I felt a Real Man. Only to be put back in my place when he said he’d only just started bike-touring and that he’d set off through Holland and Germany for no other reason than to see if he enjoyed it. Which he did. He was probably enjoying it more than we were because he had the sense to catch a train.
Among things we have seen today are a surprising number of thatched houses. Not the big floppy thatch in chocolate-box photos of how the tourist people want everyone to think of England but more solid, sensible thatch. I wonder why. Thatch is hard to lay and needs an expert. I’ve always thought it outrageously expensive to insure.
We’d have asked but it seemed impolite to bang on a door and demand an explanation.
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The other thing we have been seeing are defences against wars more recent than Napoleon and the Spanish. There’s a tendency in any era to plan for the last war and not the next. The Dutch, outsiders in 1914, watched and noted what others had done. And, seeing how things were going in Germany 20 years later, they built machine-gun lines to protect, in this case, Amsterdam. But that was the previous war; in this next one, the Germans simply drove through in tanks or flew over in planes.
We are in a hotel for a couple of nights. We are in Utrecht, which is where sensible people go when they can’t stand the idea of Amsterdam. The streets are closed to traffic. Bikes stand ready to ride. There are cafés and bars and music in the street. There are bike shops. Everything you’d want, therefore, except sunshine.
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