500 kilometers
My e-bike’s odometer clocked 500 kms today. The milestone was brought on by two lovely rides we took this weekend to enjoy the unexpected spell of warm, sunny weather1.
The first one was to Het Twikse yesterday. It’s a small nature reserve just a few kilometers north of Amsterdam. We had discovered it a couple of years ago completely by chance. We were having breakfast at a cafe in Noord one day and were looking for a place to go for a long ride2. I had pulled up the map on my phone, seen this stretch of green surrounding a water body and we had decided to aim our bikes in that general direction.
We started from home around 16:45. We biked to Pontsteiger to try and catch the ferry to NDSM Werf and managed to board it with just 45 seconds to spare3.
By the time we were at Het Twikse, it was the golden hour. The trees were still leafless and the tall grass that surrounds the many waterways there, was dry and brown. It was a dreamy, monochromatic landscape complete with a windmill and stately, waterside Dutch houses.
The second ride was to Haarlem today. I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve been to Haarlem since I got my e-bike. It’s a comfortable 20kms (on e-bike) away from Amsterdam and the route the wife has made for us takes us along water bodies and farms and through quiet parks and a vast stretch of nature that the maps label as ‘recreational area’. Part of the route is parallel to a train track and a road. It’s perfectly normal for a train and a car to woosh past us while a plane headed from or to Schiphol zooms overhead. We marvel at the multimodality of traffic in this country and try not to race the other modes4.
We parked our bikes at a bike stand right at the outskirts of the city under the watchful gaze of 14th century Amsterdamse Poort and made a beeline for a place in Botermarkt that serves delicious falafel rolls5.
We love walking through the city that the wife rightly characterizes as “less crazy Amsterdam”. It is at once familiar and new. We walked through the streets and finally sat down for a coffee at a sunny café by Haarlem’s river-canal Binnen Spaarne. The café’s sleepy house cat wasn’t averse to being petted by customers.
I hit the 500 km milestone on our ride home. The wife, who has had her bike for much longer and regularly bikes to work, narrowly missed hitting 2500 km. If her commute doesn’t do it, I am sure we could use this as an excuse for a ride next weekend.
The max temperature was 17ºC. It was still a little nippy in the mornings and evenings but nothing a light jacket and brisk pedaling couldn’t counter.↩︎
This was before the e-bike, so long back then meant 7-10 kms.↩︎
We could have taken one from Centraal Station too but it was bound to be crowded there on a rare sunny March day, so we favoured Pontsteiger despite the slight extra distance we have to bike↩︎
Despite having binged on episodes of Formula 1: Drive to Survive the day before…↩︎