from holland with love

The weather has been consistently warm lately, and with warm weather comes more biking! Yesterday was the first of [I think] many bike adventures.


It started out with Kristin and I, and a plan to bike to Delft, grab a bite to eat, then bike back. Delft is a cute little town about 15 km from Den Haag, and was a surprisingly short bike ride. I think it only took us about half an hour to get there. We took some back streets, riding through small towns along the way, and along the canal that leads into Delft.

We parked our bikes at the Oude Kerk, wandered around Delft, looked at the Delft Blue Souvenirs, then settled on lunch at this restaurant called Vrij. And also with warm weather comes patios! Unfortunately by this point the sun had completely disappeared.

While we were waiting for our food to arrive, we got a call from a few friends saying they were also on their way to Delft via bike. So the five of us (Kristin, Tom, Adam, Jamie, and myself) ate lunch, then decided to continue our bike journey to Den Hoorn (about 4km from Delft), and then to Wateringen (about 10 km from Den Hoorn).

It was so nice to bike through all these little Dutch towns, looking at all the cute little Dutch houses with red slanted roofs, and the countryside with all the farm animals wandering around in the fields, and to pass windmills and rows and rows of greenhouses. There was one point between Den Hoorn and Wateringen that I thought was really neat, where there were rows of greenhouses on our left, and the highway on our right (many Dutch highways have bike lanes), and then we round the corner to this little side street and there's a farm with chickens and hens wandering around in the road. It's always these little things that make me love Holland.

In Wateringen, Tom's bike chain snapped, and we were nowhere near a tram stop or train station. Since it was a Sunday there was nothing open, so he had to call his dad to pick him up. It sounds like a pretty crappy situation, but we all had a great laugh out of it. We stopped in a frites and ice cream shop for some sundays while we waited, then the four of us continued back to Den Haag on our bikes (which was about another 10km).

Next stop: Leiden!