Day 3: Zwolle to Oldenburg
The day dawned in Zwolle and, apart from a drunken maniac shouting his
unhinged madness in the square below at 3am, I slept pretty well. That
being said, I got fairly grumpy just after waking up. The Apart!Hotel
(how I hate that !) has the usual system where the sockets don't work unless
you have the key in the room. This is a giant pain in the bum when you're
trying to charge all your stuff while out for dinner. The even more
giant pain in the bum is that the heated towel rail which you switched on
before leaving the room…doesn't turn itself back on again when you come in from dinner. You have to
manually turn it back on again. So while I
blissfully slept dreaming of dry shorts and socks, in fact they were lying
soaking on a rail drying through evaporation. Or rather not drying.
I packed and climbed into my cloyingly moist shorts and top. Ugh.
The only human interaction at the Apart!Hotel in Zwolle is the breakfast.
It appears you can't serve breakfast remotely using an app. Who knew eh?
I was very pleasantly surprised to be greeted by a perky waitress — who
gamely overlooked my damp clothes and offered me infinite coffee and a feast
for breakfast.
A feast fit for a long distance cyclist
Fresh scrambled eggs and bacon, bread, cheese, ham. I couldn't have wanted for
more and, indeed, I really hardly managed to make a dent in it. There
was a lot of food left after I'd tried — and failed — to lay waste to that
fabulous breakfast. Had I known what was in store for the day, I would
have tried to stuff in that extra couple of bread rolls, the boiled egg and
the apple.
Zwolle was pretty and quiet as I rolled out of town. The “undercarriage”
was complaining a bit after yesterday but the legs didn't feel so bad and I
started grinding out the kilometres.
The Netherlands continued to be delightful for a cyclist. I have settled
into a bit of a rhythm. I don't listen to podcasts for the first 50km
and I try to get those first 50km under my belt before finding somewhere to
stop for my mid-morning coffee. Here's a video of what those first 50km
were like.
They were like this
Look ma, it goes round and round.
It means “thrift store of the snuffle goose” according to Google
I had hoped to stop in the unfortunately named Slagharen but, in a portent
of things to come, there was nothing open although it did have a London Eye
sized ferris wheel and a tumbled down roller coaster.
Come to Slagharen and ride the ferris wheel
Let's have a coffee and then buy some more giant pants Hans.
I was on a cycle path on the left hand side of a fast two lane road and
there was a big canal. I think it was the
Küstenkanal. It was long and straight
and had a lot of barges on it which, come to
think of it, rather defines what a canal is.
This is a big kanal
And my view looked like this
This is what it was like.
This is what it was like four hours later
Finally, six hours after my last drink and eight hours after my last food,
a garage appeared. I was actually so hungry, I could barely
eat.
The bike is in the background, the croissant was a saviour.
The heavens opened and I got very wet. I only own one piece of
clothing which could be called “hi-viz” — because hi-viz is for dorks…I'd
rather get squished etc etc — and I put on my hi-viz rain jacket only to
find out that although it is very high visibility, it's also got a high
porosity and I was almost immediately soaked.
I'm too old to hang out in bus shelters
Oh crap
The last 20 km were really miserable. They were very wet and with
appalling road conditions. The only saving grace is that the
south-westerly wind which had been blowing me along since (effectively) Hoek
van Holland, continued to work in my favour. I think if I had had to
do this into the wind, I might have got the bus instead.
See, exactly the effing same but this time wet.
Just as I reached Oldenburg, the rain stopped and as I sat rehydrating and
refuelling it was a lovely sunny summer's eve and it seems like quite a nice
place. It had to be because there didn't seem to be anywhere
else within 100 km that was open.
Don't judge me. I deserve steak and chips.
I've had two back-to-back 190km days and I'm feeling a bit wiped out.
I have another 160km day to Hamburg tomorrow and I had intended to
keep powering on to Denmark but I think I'll try to make to to Hamburg and
have a day off on Monday. My “contact points” will almost certainly
thank me for a day to recover.
- Distance: 191km 🙂 — This is once again…a very long way.
- Climbing: 392m 😀 — This part of Holland and Germany is really flat.
- Undercarriage: 😢 — the less said about this the better.
- Route: 🙂 — Well, I guess it was flat.
- Body: 😔 - hands getting quite a lot worse
- Bike: 🙂 — There's an irritating rattle from somewhere but it keeps going.
First off, well done so far Ewan! Mad to do it of course, but I knew that anyway. I’m struck by how clean and litter-free the Netherlands are (“is”? - grammar struggle). It’s not like that in independence-obsessed government-lacking Scotland! I’m also amazed by your seemingly calorie-light exertions. Call that a steak? It’s not like that at The Butchershop in Glasgow (sorry to remind you!). But I suppose much of the point is the finding of things that aren’t “like that here”. I remain in awe. Paul x.
ReplyDeleteGreat work, Ewan! Very impressive!
ReplyDeleteSmall piece of advice, those slots in hotels where you have to insert your room key work with any sturdy card, e.g. credit card or even a business card, so you can leave the sockets on and take your key.
Good luck with the rest of your journey!
Take care,
Juan