Netherlands/Belgium Bike Tour Day 2: Edam to Recreatiegebied Spaarmwoude
Posted by Cassie, November 9th, 2009
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
We spent the morning walking around Edam taking care of some errands. Edam was another cute Dutch town with canals running through it. We found the VVV (tourist office), and we managed to find the bike maps we needed. The tourist office in Amsterdam was out of stock of the bike maps we needed, so we were only able to get a map that would get us a little past Edam. The little tourist office in Edam was better stocked with maps than the tourist office in Amsterdam. The Netherlands has the best method of navigating the bike routes. All the intersections have a number, and each intersection has signs pointing the direction to the next numbered intersection. Instead of following signs to a specific town, you go from 12 to 15 to 14 and so on. It was really easy to figure out which direction you needed to go.
Edam
We rode out of Edam and had an enjoyable ride along a dike by a canal through the Dutch countryside. Then, we left the countryside and entered an industrial area by Wormer. There was a huge chocolate factory there, and the whole area smelled like cocoa beans! We left the industrial area and rode through Zaan Schans, where there were lots of windmills. We toured one of the windmills that was being used as a sawmill. It was really neat to look inside a working windmill. We wished we would have had more time to spend in Zaan Schans, but it was getting late. We still had many kilometers to cover to reach our destination.
Zaanse Schans windmill
Inside sawmill at Zaan Schans
We took our first ferry across the big canal by Zaandam. It was awesome because bikes got to ride the ferry for free!
Cassie on our first ferry
We were aiming for Haarlem today, but we did not make it to Haarlem since we had so many errands to do today. Fortunately, there are campground everywhere in the Netherlands, so it was not a problem to find someplace else to stop for the night. In addition to getting bike maps, spare inner tubes, patches, and groceries, we also bought a camp stove. We could not bring our camp stove on the plane, so we had to buy a camp stove in Europe. It is a small stove that runs on canisters of gas, so we thought we could get it back home with us on the plane. It was exciting to have a camp stove and cook our first hot meal of the trip! We camped in a recreation area just on the other side of the canal. The campground was more like a resort! It had a restaurant, a snack shop, and a swimming pool. The campground was also on the approach path for the planes coming into the Schipol Airport in Amsterdam. Even though we were camped in the middle of the forest, we could hear planes all night long!
After we had unpatched inner tubes on my bike, our second day of riding went smoothly. It encouraged us that we could really make it all the way to Budapest!
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