Items tagged with Netherlands

2008-06-01 00:00:00
Written By: Claudine du Plessis

Cycling Day: 1
Distance: 118km

We had a good breakfast of oats and chocolate sprinkles.  The cycling to Appeldoorn was pleasant, the roads are in excellent condition and also almost completely flat.  It starting drizzling at about 10AM, giving us an opportunity to use our ponchos. Scenery was amazing, endless green fields, dense forests, canals, lots of cows..  The route was also very safe, every road had a cycling lane next to it or completely separate to it.  At about half past 5, we arrived at Emilie’s house and got a very warm welcome.  

She stays in an old military complex, the house and yard is massive.  We also had some GOOD spaghetti bolognaise, custard and sweetie pie desert, and she took us for a spin in her "pimped" Mini.  Emilie was so helpful and friendly, she let us do washing, helped us dry our clothes and gave us some eggs, bread and cookies for the next day’s lunch.

2008-06-02 00:00:00
Written By: Claudine du Plessis

Cycling Day: 2
Distance: 168km

This was the longest day of our trip, I am a little too tired to type in all the details now.  But let me see what I can do: We started at 7AM.  Weather was nice and sunny, it started getting really hot later on.  We stopped for snack shopping, lunch, and lots of snacks.  Scenery was once again beautiful, dense forests, green fields, fairy tale houses..

We only noticed when we were in Germany when all the signs’ language changed, there are no border posts, and unfortunately our route had no “Welcome to Germany” signs, would have made a great pic.Anyway, 168kms is further than it sounds.  We were exhausted when we arrived at Stephan’s house at half past 9 that evening.  They had a wonderful dinner of spaghetti bolognaise and salad ready for us, and we tried some German beers.  That is all I can write now, really need to shower and sleep… Tomorrow we are going to Hanover.

2008-05-30 00:00:00
Written By: Billy van Graan

8 hours later we landed in Cairo and had a couple of hours to kill.  We watched they guy that x-rays the luggage accept bribes from people who bought too mach duty free booze. 

From Cairo, it was 4 hours to Amsterdam. The boxes arrived an hour after us and didn’t look too damaged. It was quite a mission loading them on to a bus and again carrying them to our campsite, Het Amsterdamse Bos.  The first night we were staying in an 8 bed chalet and the guy at reception said he had no place to store the bike boxes for us.  So before we could go anywhere, we had to assemble our bikes and chain them to a tree.  Lance remarked that maybe we should put on some sunscreen, he could feel himself burning - this was 6 o'clock in the afternoon!  (The sun finally set at half past ten)

Taking the subway to Amsterdam Centre, we couldn’t figure out how the tickets worked, so we got on without one and had our first trip for free.  (Coming back, we did find a coin operated ticket machine)  The rest of the night was just spent in Amsterdam city, which is a very organized, clean and expensive place.

2008-07-06 00:00:00
Written By: Billy van Graan

Click on an image to enlarge it and then browse the larger images with the Next and Previous buttons at the bottom right. This contains all the photos from the updates we did. Just makes it easier than to go to every single article to check the photos.

Flying and Netherlands

Germany

Poland

Lithuania

Latvia

Estonia

Russia

2009-02-10 10:08:59
Written By: Billy van Graan

Name: Amstercow
Type: Bicycle Touring
Distance: 3300km
Countries: Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia
Date: 28 May 2008 – 2 July 2008
Team: Myself, Claudine du Plesses and Lance Smit

Amstercow is a 3300km bicycle tour from Amsterdam in the Netherlands across Europe to St. Petersburg in Russia. It was first planned to end in Moscow rather than St. Petersburg but since getting visas for Belarus is nearly impossible for South Africans we had to change our route.

New Route - Click to Enlarge

The trip was Claudine’s idea and at first I would have not gone with. But when Lance decided he would go with Claudine and I realized the trip would actually happen I was in.

The highlight of the trip was using couchsurfing.com for the first time and all the people we met through it really made the trip and memories special.