Our Adventure in Europe

Well, now you know a little history about where we went on the excursion for school. Now for the details and a map to give you some perspective on just HOW MUCH PEOPLE BIKE HERE! If you read Jeff’s post about Amstelveen (the town we live in) you know we are about a 25-30 minute metro trip to Amsterdam central station. To date, Jeff and I have not rode our bikes into the city. We take the tram or metro. Well for the bike excursion we were told to meet at central station and take the ferry across the river to North Amsterdam where the trip would commence. Now we had to meet at 10am on the other side of the river, so trying to leave here and take the metro with my bike meant I would be traveling in peak morning commute and some rumors are that you CAN’T take bikes on metros at this time. I have not verified if this is true or not yet, but since other students were planning to bike from down in this area to central station, I thought I would earn my next Dutch merit badge and bike into the city like a true Amsterdammer.

So, that morning I bike 15 minutes to meet some students at Uilenstede (otherwise known as the slum housing for students where Jeff and I lived for 5 whole days). Sergi from Barcelona has offered to be our fearless leader as he has lived here for several months and knows how to get to CS (central station) by bike. The other members of the biking crew are Angela from Peru, Giovanni from Mexico, and Sayaka from Japan. Now mind you that Angela and Giovanni have not ridden a bike in YEARS and Sayaka has a really crummy bike that requires double the effort. Off we go and Sergi quickly realizes his usual trip of 25 minutes is not gonna happen. The group repeatedly gets separated by traffic lights, slow riding, near crashes with professional Dutch bikers and general chaos of keeping a group of dysfunctional bike riding non-Dutch people together.

All this while I am mesmerized to be seeing the city from this view. I am traveling new streets, seeing buildings, canals and parks that I haven’t passed on my treks through Amsterdam to date. It was beautiful. And fairly easy considering streets are interwoven with bike paths, so while you need to be brave to ride the roads with cars (more often other bikers are the bigger concern or aimless tourists who wandered onto bike paths unsuspectingly – hint, the red paths are for the bikes!) you are pretty safe to also enjoy the scenery.

Well, 45 minutes later we arrive at CS and take the ferry to north Amsterdam. From here the true biking begins. We pass through a small suburb and then hit the typical Dutch countryside. Lots of green space, canals, polders (low lying areas reclaimed from water), sheep, cows, horses, and cute little towns with brick houses, orange roofs and tiny gardens. It was a beautiful day, not too hot. Sun here and there but no rain to be seen! We were lucky. We biked to the waste site of Volgermeer and had another presentation by the reclamation company. Then we biked to Marken, a coastal town off IJ-meer that is known by tourists for its green wooden houses. Extremely quaint. I even managed to find a nice kitty cat that let me pet it for a while. We ate herring (ok, the Dutch people ate herring, I watched, then ate a beer and oude kaas broodje (old cheese sandwich)). We sunned ourselves along this harbor and relaxed.

About 1 1/2 hours later we started the bike ride home. About one hour into this ride it became clear just how far we had ridden…and how much further we had to go!!! We were traveling the path along the river at this point but couldn’t even catch a glimpse of Amsterdam. Finally, we know we are getting close when we see a bus stop. But alas, the map proves we still have kilometers and kilometers to go. At this point some of us were considering taking the ferry back to CS and taking the metro home, but we decided to suck it up as a group and we all headed into the city via a bridge that the local Dutchies lead us across. Our new local tour guides (fellow classmates) lead a group of 20 of us through the city from the northeast. At this point, my ass is screaming, though my legs are hanging in there. I am not alone as other students are also ready to call it a day. Eventually, we make it back to school where the younger of us separate to go play some football (soccer) and the smarter of us go home!

So, just how far did this excursion take us you ask? Well, I left my house at 8:30am. I got home at 5:30pm. I would say about 2 1/2 hours of that was NOT biking. So, I have mapped the general area we traveled. This map gives you a taste
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I traveled from Amstelveen to Central Station to Marken (though we went straight north first) then back down again. In essence we biked 75 km or 46 miles! Yes, 46 freaking miles! My ankle and ass took a few days to recover. But, I wouldn’t trade that day for anything. It was beautiful. I saw a side of Amsterdam I would probably never have discovered on my own. I got the chance to ride and chat with tons of classmates while enjoying beautiful scenery. It was amazing. I honestly thought the next day my legs would just turn into ripples of muscle like FloJo. Well, they may have felt like that for a few days (internally of course) but the external conversion didn’t transpire. Damn. Guess I will need to do 75km biking excursions regularly to get that look!