We ride away from the hotel and at the 2 km mark, we make our first stop. A tall tower, heavy looking and from what Murray can gleam from the plaque, perhaps a water tower. Except it has windows half way up.
The wind is howling. Right into our faces. Murray rides in front and I hide behind him. I can tell I am getting a draft as I catch up to him in certain places. Our average speed today is much slower than the rest of the days, but we are not concerned as we have plenty of time to do the distance. I guess this is payback for the four days of wind at our backs from Bruges to The Hague.
The landscape looks like the Badlands, in Southern Alberta. Sandy dune like hills with tuffs of greenery everywhere. Did I mention hills? We make a game of guessing the incline on the small hills. Steepest hill is 5%, the usual grade is about 3% with many 4% grades.
In Edmonton and where we ride, in Ardrossan, the cycling community is very willing to help cyclists, or at least check to make sure a cyclist on the side of the road is okay. About 2 kms outside Zandvoort, we come across a young woman changing her tire on the side of the path. We slow down and ask if she needs help, Murray asks “Do you have a pump?” She says No! We stop, of course. As Murray and the woman work on her tire, we chat about bikes and riding. This is her last ride for the season as she is pregnant and it is now too uncomfortable to ride. She hasn’t had a flat in five years, and today she had to have one. But, once again, Canadians have come to the aid of the Dutch. The tire gets inflated and we are all on our way.
Even now, 80 years later, the Dutch remember and are thankful for the help of the Canadians in liberating their country from the Germans during WWII. It still comes up in conversations with Dutch folk.
Zandvoort is another seaside town that fills on the weekends and in the summer, and for a wild weekend when the F1 race is on. I want to see the track so we walk down the beach and over to the track. There are some street cars on the track zipping around. We watch a couple of laps from a parking lot close to the track. I can imagine the noise and humanity during an F1 weekend.
