After long, hearty and very tasty breakfast, I finally left the hotel around 11. There was no great hurry today, I’d around 70km to do and couldn’t check in for the ferry until 8pm. So the idea was to take it easy and take in a couple of sights.
I was off, it was dry but a little windy ( it is the Netherlands). The roads were surprisingly busy, with an assortment of cyclists from old ladies on bikes to lycra clad peletons.
First stop of the day was Gouda with it’s impressive town square and cheese !
Time for a snack , after a careful perusal of the menu’s I chose a restaurant offering coffee and cake for €6. So I sat in the sun, awaiting my treat and listening to the town hall clock chime out Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”. Any joy was short lived as the rain arrived before my cake. Gentle at first then torrents. So I had to hide inside !
Off again, fortunately the rain was fairly light. The outskirts of Gouda were quite pretty but no photos because of the rain. Eventually it stopped, nicely timed to allow me to take a snap of a strange house !
It didn’t take that long to reach Delft and yet another impressive town square and a network of small canals lined with restaurants and houses.
With time to kill, I cycled around a bit, then started to look for a restaurant for lunch. Eventually found one where I could lock the Brompton and keep an eye on it. Had my first Bratwurst of the trip !
I now had 25km or so to go to the ferry and hours left. Amazingly the sun came out, so I sat on a bench overlooking a lake and listened to the Monaco F1 Grand Prix, and started to write this blog !
7km to go and a familiar scenario. The clouds were getting darker. I knew what was coming, so stopped the bike and put the rain covers and jackets on, then I kept an eye out for possible places to hide. Not only did it start to rain, but I was getting a proper finale on the last day in mainland Europe. Thunder and lightning. Fortunately, I found a bus shelter, before it really started raining hard.
What a storm it turned out to be ! half an hour of sitting in the bus shelter, which was been buffeted by strong winds, pushing the glass against me and rocking all the bikes in the stands, along with torrential rain and deafening thunder. There was no way I could have ridden in it, so I was glad I had shelter and time to wait it out. The question was how long to wait, had it past or was the lull in the intensity of the rain just to tempt me out ? I decided to wait a bit !
After 50 minutes the rain really eased off and I decided to go for it. It was all going so well until my route ahead was flooded.
I wasn’t going to risk cycling through that as I’d no idea how deep it was or how long it went off for, so I let the GPS reroute me. A couple of km later I was back on my planned route. Once at the port they boarded us very early. So I’m now happily sat in the cabin, finishing the blog and then going for a drink to steady my nerves !
Tomorrow it’s just a matter of getting home, sadly there’s engineering works and a rail replacement bus service, so I’ve replanned my route to add a bit of riding in the Essex countryside !
Steady Pedals 