I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike.

Well it’s offical… I’ve been Dutchisized (yes I know that’s not a word).  But yesterday I bought my bike, so today we broke it in and went to a town called Spakenburg located south on the Ijsselmeer river.  It is part of another town called Bunschoten, so the offical name I guess would be Bunschoten-Spakenburg.  Kind of like Kitchener-Waterloo in Ontario. It used to be two seperate villages but then back in 1965 they came together to form the current town.  The town is known for it’s boats and traditional clothing that is on of the few areas in the Netherlands where it is still worn. So this is the path we took to get to the pier in Spakenburg.  It took us about 45 minutes or so to get there, thanks to the wind and one pit stop for ice cream.   The road Zevenhuiserstraat is a straight road and takes you through farm land and some really beautiful houses.  Expensive houses.  It’s a great road to bike on, minus the cars that zip passed at mach one and the smell of freshly sprayed manure.  We stopped at a very cute little country cafe and had ice cream and enjoyed the little farm they had with some goats and chickens.  The ice cream here in the Netherlands is like the Italian gelato, so that means that I can get my lemon ice!!  I love that stuff.  After we finished up with the treat we continued up the street until we got to Spakenburg and ended up basically in the center of town from what it looked like.  But it takes you right to the harbour where we saw some of the old Dutch Paddle Boats also called “Botters” with the big paddle on the side of the boat.  Plus a statue of a traditionally dressed lady, and apparently it is mainly  on Sundays the older women will still dress in traditional garb.  I did see one lady but only her back and I wasn’t going to run over and ask for a picture since she was having trouble navigating the cobblestones with her walker.  We then headed up and went to the pier the looks over the river, along the shore of the river on the north side you can see all the windmills (modern ones).  But it was interesting to see since that is a familiar site when you are traveling along the highway to Amsterdam.  The wind was really kicking up, so the water was super choppy. We still saw a lot of boats out on the water or coming in to dock.  But at least the sun was out even if it was a tad (please note sarcasm) windy.  We would have liked to stop and get a coffee or something to warm ourselves up, but since it was Sunday, nothing was open.  It would have been nice to sit by the harbour and have a drink, but I guess we are going to have to wait until tourist season kicks in and we can bike back up for the day and go to the beach that was also nearby.

 

 

 

 

 

So we headed up the dijk that is next to the river back to Zevenhuiserstraat so that we could head home.  The Ijsselmeer is the name of the body of water,  and a dijk runs the perimeter of it.  From up top it just looks like a hill that has a path on it, but it does come up fairly high and and the path on it is quite narrow, so a bit nerve wracking when you have people coming in the opposite direction on their bikes and you have to figure out where you are going to go.  Especially if you aren’t as experienced on a bike like me!  Well it only took us about 20 minutes or so to hit Amersfoort again, and to be very honest my legs are doing fine… my butt on the other hand needs to get use to the seat!  We had a great day with the kids on our little jaunt out to the water, and we’ll probably do it again very soon.  It really isn’t that far to go as long as you aren’t going into the wind. I’m glad I got my bike when I did, now I’ll have the summer to get use to riding it and enjoying going places.  I would like to get at least one saddle bag so that I can put my camera in there and a bottle of water.  I might do that when I come back in June.