Travels with Claud

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Day 11

20160827

Den Bosch to Breda



In yesterdays blog I forgot to mention the ‘incident with the dogs’. I was leaving Nijmegen and just about to cross the River Maas. I saw a couple ahead of me walking two huge dogs. Seeing that the track narrowed to cross the bridge I slowed down so that I could give them a very wide berth. (I got attacked by an Alsatian twice when I was young, and have had a bit of thing about big dogs with big teeth ever since!).

Anyway I passed the bloke with big dog one with no concerns at all, but as I passed his partner with big dog two, big dog two lunged at me dragging the poor woman with him. It looked determined to take a chunk out of my right leg so I stamped on the pedals to get away as quickly as I could. The dog made a final leap for me but only managed to scratch his front claws (paws sounds much too much like nice doggy), down my right thigh. It lasted seconds but it was a very scary moment. This morning the top of my thigh is yellow and blue, scratched and a bit sore. Could have been much worse!

It was another very hot day today, around 30c. The ride from Den Bosch to Breda was completely different form anything experienced so far. For a start it was about two thirds through woodland, which was really welcome after the last couple of days of searing heat, with very little shade. I would have packed up long ago without the factor 30! The other thing was that the cycle tracks were the poorest I’ve come across so far. I don’t know whether the route I selected was based on ‘sore arse’ a must, but it was very challenging.

The tracks through the beautiful woods were mostly sandy, which I suppose should be no surprise seeing that the woodlands are northern european pine forests, (reminded me very much of the woods near the town I lived in Germany in the 1960’s, which thinking about it isn’t far from here at all). But the really strange thing was that so many of the tracks were made of brick, rather than asphalt or tarmac, whatever the difference is. Is one a brand name? the combination of these two surfaces made for a really slow, and sometimes uncomfortable, vibrating ride. It took me four and a half hours to do 54 kilometres, which surprised me. That’s an average of about 12km/h, pretty slow.

The forecast is for another very hot day tomorrow, so I’ve decided to scupper the70km ride to Rotterdam. The combination of heat, and sore bits, has found the limitations of my commitment to roughing it! I won’t lose any sleep. It’s been a great couple of weeks and I’m looking forward to being a tourist in Rotterdam for a couple of days.

Riding through the shady woods today really reminded me of when I was about twelve or thirteen. I lived in a small village in Oxfordshire that backed onto Blenheim Palace. As kids we used to ride through the less well known parts of the park, well away from the tourist routes. We’d saunter along chatting and singing, and I clearly remember my love of the dappled shade under the tree lined lanes.Today’s trip was like that. For some strange reason the song that kept playing in my head was a Blue Mink song from about that time. I don’t know what it was called but I remember part of the lyric, “what we need is a great big melting pot, big enough to take the world and all it’s got, keep it turning for a hundred years or more, turn out coffee coloured people by the score”. Anyone else remember it?

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