Travelling out there was as hassle-free as usual - a couple of hours to get from London onto the Eurotunnel train at Folkestone, a short ride under The Channel, then just over 3hrs driving to Maastricht. We took a quick stop midway to fuel up on coffee (and the kids on sweets) at the petrol station near Brussels, which had a line of seven coffee vending machines. Coffee is a major part of life in Belgium! I'd borrowed a Thule Outrider 531 roof bike rack from a clubmate - highly recommended so long as you have room in the car for the front wheel (the bike is fork-mounted to the lockable rack and is really secure). We probably could have just crammed the bike in the boot, but we wouldn't have had room for the two boxes of wine that we brought back!The only tricky part of the journey was dealing with the Belgian motorway loons. They drive about 3ft off your rear bumper when you're in the fast lane, even though you're a) going very fast already, b) passing a line of slow-moving lorries on the inside lane and c) leaving a decent (read: mimimum that feels safe) amount of room to the car in front. I think they might actually be drafting to save fuel. Nothing like flicking on the rear foglights for a second to see the shocked looks in the rear view mirror! I know I shouldn't, but their driving always winds me up. It's really odd that it always seems confined to the Belgian roads too - as soon as you get onto the French, German or Dutch motorway systems the phenomenon disappears.
Enough about the Belgians though. The cycling in Dutch Limburg is just superb and I ended up doing a solid 2hr ride each day, averaging 200-210W per ride. Good base miles stuff, with a few Level 3 hard efforts thrown in to keep things interesting. I covered quite a lot of the Amstel Gold Race route which takes place this weekend. The town of Valkenburg (where the race ends) is something of a mecca for cyclists in the region, featuring the Cauberg climb at a steady 12%. It's only a short climb but puts paid to the general view that Holland is flat. The south in particular has many short, sharpish climbs to test the legs. Nothing like the Surrey Hills that I'm used to, but still handy for training.It was the holiday weekend, so obviously there were lots of people around, but I never expected to see quite so many cyclists. On Saturday morning there were literally thousands of them, mostly in massive groups of 20-40 riders. Surprisingly miserable buggers too! I only spoke to one other rider, who's English was poor (by Dutch standards - meaning that he wasn't completely fluent - and considerably better than my garbled, gutteral attempts at Dutch). Nearly everyone else ignored me. Now I know that when a big group of club riders go past the other way you are unlikely to get a reaction to a wave (they're concentrating, talking to each other, etc) but usually a single rider on a quiet country road will return a greeting with a brief nod at the least. Not here though, and I went past at least 20 individual riders on quiet roads each morning! It's good to know that English cyclists are comparatively friendly...we'll see how the Dutch do again when I next see them en mass, which will be at La Marmotte in July (seems to be a Belgian/Dutch event rather than a French one). I'll post soon with a few details and a piece describing my first attempt at this ride last year.
And on a final note - Dutch cycle paths. All I can say is WOW! Fantastic - wide, well surfaced, well marked, sensibly planned and they give you priority around roundabouts and junctions. On each 2hr ride I don't think I had to touch my foot to the road more than once. Maybe there's some form of inverse relationship between the quality of cycle paths and rider friendliness, because we have, in the UK, some of the worst bike paths I have ever seen, but some of the friendliest riders.
Ik ben Engels, maar mijn fiets houdt van Holland.
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