Where the cycleways are paved with gold ...

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Millengen on the Rhein => Dreumal, 79.3kms, Total 2344.2, Ride time 4'40"

Happy Birthday to Christie, Happy Birthday to Christie ..."

What a place for a touring cyclist to wake up. The Netherlands, where the cycle tracks are made of gold, the roads are flat, motorists are considerate and the cycle route second to none in the world. Yea, right.

My early morning attempt at singing "Happy Birthday to you" was broken off abruptly with Christie announcing she was going for a run, so instead I broke camp and got us ready to go while she went for a run to cheer herself up.

The day oscillated after that, there were no cycleways paved in gold, in fact there were no signs at all as far as we could see. Then as soon as we hit the dyke out of town we were confronted with ferocious headwinds, followed by rain. Head down battling our way forward, we got to a junction afte about 10kms only to find that we'd missed a turn off and gone about 3kms out of our way. So back we went. We finally pulled into Njimigen 25kms later, wet, chilled and wondering what the hell we were doing in this Country.

After staring at my map under a railway bridge for 10 minutes, we headed into Town and found this awesome coffee shop. Christie order a big cappachino and I order a hot chocolate with a double choc chip muffin on the side. Suffice to say, I ende dp with the cappachino and Christie had my hot chocolate. As we warmed up, and Chrisite sent brithday thank you's by SMS (with me repeatedly spelling Njimiegen to her in different ways) we also discovered that the plasti coffee bean things in the centre of our table were actually chocolates that we coul dhave for free so we set to with gusto. 20 minutes later we were toasty warm, the rain had stopped outside and we were feeling grea, so decided to carry on.

about 1.5kms I was convinced we were going the wrong way, so turned us around and we cycled back only to find out we were actually going the right way. about 10kms out of town it started raining again, so we sheltered under a bridge for 10 minutes, but it didn't look like it would stop, so we set off again, another 3mks later and with a sudden Hiss, bang, Christie got her second flat tyre. We pushed, and carried our gear back 300 metres to this little shelter, where Christie announced that when she fixed her first puncture it hadnt worked properl. This sent me into a foul mood as I'd have to fix the tyre in the wet, so I told her to get it only to find that even better, we'd lost the spare tube entirely. I took the punctured tube out, and sure enough the glue wasn't sticking to the tre patches properly. All of this took about 30 minutes, and it was at this point when we were both cold, tired and pretty snappy that Christie's family called to wish C a happy birthday, at which point she promptly burst out crying. What a day.

I finally fixed the tube and got it back together, just as a nice old guy came cycling up and asked us if we needed help. He offered to lead me to a bike shop 3kms back down the road, so off I went with my new friend Jack (who was 76) back under the bridge we'd sheltered under an hour or so before and into a small town where I picked up a spare tube. Jack then invited Christie and I back to have coffee with him and his wife, and so if Christie's parets had only called an hour later they would have got her nice and warm, sitting in a nice lounge eating ginger cake and drinking real coffee hearing stories about the Kack and his wife's travels and their kids.

We pushed on for another 25kms inot the headwinds to a small campsite on a farm outside Dreumal. After a bit of a saga finding a supermarket, we settled down for a wonderful dinner of bread rolls, salads, beers, cider, chips and chocolate next to our tent which was nicely nestled behind a barn out of the wind. Even the sun came out for a while to end the day.

Happy Birthday C.

xox.


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