Day 13: Utrecht to Hoek van Holland

Top marks to the Eye Hotel (named after the famous British R&B covers band) for a quiet room amid the Utrecht freshers party central scene. We enjoyed another fabulous Dutch breakfast spread and then headed out on the road.

Today was just over 100km to Hoek van Holland and we had a lot of time to get there. Leaving at 9am meant we would get there around 2pm and have four and a half hours to wait for the ferry. So we dawdled.

Endless perfect cycling infrastructure.

The Netherlands are an absolute joy to cycle in. I’ve gone on and on about how great the cycling infrastructure is in cities and in the countryside and I’m going to go on and on about it a little bit more. Cycling is embedded in the country in a way that we could only dream of in the UK. From signage to just how many types of cyclists there are, it’s eye opening. We live in Cambridge which has the highest density of cycling per head of population in the UK and it’s nothing compared to way the Dutch do it.

As we trundled along, going considerably faster than we wanted to go due to a lovely tailwind, we discussed the Netherlands. It’s clearly a very rich society — about 40% richer than the UK on GDP per head basis — and being richer makes things a lot easier. It’s incredibly well ordered and civilised — a sort of end point for western liberal democracy maybe. I know there’s a big constituency of people who think that end point is a bad place but, for me as a centrist Dad, I love it.

The only thing in the Netherlands which seems weirdly disordered is the vehicle number place system. To understand why this matters, you have to realise that I am to some degree “on spectrum” and every country I cycle through or go to, I try to work out the how the number plates work. Germany? Easy, first characters (one, two or three) are a contraction of the registration place of the car. Everything after that is free for the individual licensing authority to designate. More characters for “B” (Berlin) or “M” (Munich), a lot less characters for “GER” (Germersheim District) since it’s smaller. Spain? Three letters, four numbers, no vowels in the letters, the first letter of the three indicates the age of the car.

The Dutch system, is mad. They have XX-99-XX, XX-XX-99, 99-XX-99, 999-X-99, XXX-9-XX etc etc. Basically every potential way of organising a six character address space. But they don’t use vowels (so you can’t spell “poo”) and don’t use “M” and “W” because they’re too wide in the font they chose. Aaaarghhh…this sort of thing hurts my head and seems deeply un-Dutch.  Just add another character and you can increase your address space by a factor of 18 (26 minus AEIOUWM)

Ok, enough of that. You all know I’m a bit obsessive about this stuff.

And for those of you who are as obsessed about the orthography of other languages, here’s a perfect example of the capitalisation of the digraph “ij” in Dutch.

Orthography in action.

The hot kilometres counted down and we continued to ride mostly on top of dijks with the occasional foray into an impossibly cute little village with windmills and those bridges.

These cute bridges.

On one of the dijks there was a display of an engine which, I think, was from a Lancaster bomber and had been found during some drainage of the surrounding fields.

Memories of a darker time

As we got closer to Rotterdam, everything got busier and a little more complex to manage. At one point we had to get up onto a bridge using stairs! In the world of perfect cycling infrastructure, this could have been a demerit for the Dutch but they had put a little bike escalator along the side of the steps. Not sure if the video works but I’ve never seen this before.

You just press your brakes and the bike goes up by itself. Genius.

Coming from the east, Rotterdam is a big complicated modern city. Lots of junctions even with the great cycling infrastructure. We had time so we stopped underneath the Erasmusbrug which is so famous in Rotterdam that it’s part of the city’s logo. There was a very cool bar in which we ate Dutch snacks and tried to cool down.

It was hot and Rotterdamers were out in force drinking and eating.

Filled to the brim with cheese, ham and pickles we set off into the increasingly hot and humid afternoon.

As one travels west from Rotterdam, the northern bank becomes increasingly industrialised and the southern bank of the river morphs into Europoort. This is one of the largest port complexes in the world — and a big contributor to why the Dutch are so rich. It handles 12,000,000 containers a year along with bulk cargoes of everything from crude oil to iron ore.

We thought the BASF factory in Ludwigshafen was big. Pah! You could drop it anywhere in Europoort and probably lose it.

The shipping got denser and larger.

Big sea going ships (and some continuing brilliant cycling infrastructure)

If you like industry — and gravel factories — the EV15 is definitely the route to do in Europe. Right on cue, we saw the final EV15 sign of the journey. We’ve been following these for over 1,500 km and it’s a testament to the amazing Eurovelo team that they have pulled together not just this route but 20 odd other routes around Europe.

The last EV15 sign.

Just two km short of the Hoek van Holland Stena terminal is the Maeslantkering. I got this crap photo of it but the photos from the air in the Wikipedia article give a great insight into the huge size of this flood defence. When there’s a storm surge in the North Sea, the two giant segments swing out into the Rhine and save Rotterdam and most of Holland from catastrophic flooding.

Terrible photo. Sorry.

And then we were there. 13 days ago and 1,500km away and 2,000m higher than this we took this selfie with a lighthouse in the Alps and set off.

Colder, wetter, higher, and a long way away.

Hot, sea-level and, in my case, a lot hairier.

There is, in fact, a tiny bit more to the Rhine so it felt appropriate that we cycled out to the Strand (“beach”) and to the long spit that marks the end of the Rhine. It had started as a tiny stream in Switzerland and ended up like this.

The end of the Rhine.

We had a celebratory beer and a wine amid the Dutch families enjoying the rather wonderful beaches on the North Sea coast. I wouldn’t think that they’re going to rival the sandy delights of Thailand or South Beach but they were pretty nice on a day like today.

I think this was richly deserved.

We rolled back to the ferry terminal for our 18:15 boarding and inevitably had to wait for quite some time in a huge queue of cars and motorbikes to get on. By 19:00 I was thinking of deploying my Angry Eyes™ but I was amused by these truly awful “low rider” VW vans.

This is not cool. They look broken.

After about 90 minutes of fannying around, we did end up on the boat and with some trepidation we found our cabin. I’ve definitely ended strongly on the accommodation front. The “Captain’s Cabin” class is really rather nice. There’s a window looking out over the front (“bow”) of the boat and the room doesn’t smell of poo — which has been a problem on previous trips.

This is really quite nice. Maybe a cruise next year? Kill me now.

The bar and restaurant were…functional but unprepossessing and, on time, the ship left the dock, turned around and headed out into the North Sea.

That’s the North Sea out there. And the spit we cycled along on the right.

It’s tempting to think that we’re done, but we’re not. To complete this, we’ve still got to get back to Cambridge. There’s a long 115km day with a lot of climbing tomorrow. We’ve got used to pan-flat days and tomorrow we’ve got to brave the rolling hills of Essex which, I think, will be a very big shock to our bodies. Hopefully it all doesn’t go horribly wrong on the final day.

Stats:

• Distance: 102km
• Avg Speed: 20.3kmh. Tried to go as slowly as possible so we didn’t need to wait too long for the ferry but the tailwind blew us along.
• Body parts: I am having some significant “soft-tissue” issues but I’m hoping that copious application of SudoCrem™ will get me through tomorrow.

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