Very Casual Bike Trip

Again, here's a -->MAP<-- (100 kb): this weekend's rides in red, previous rides in black.

The wind changed. Yesterday's trip eastbound from the North Sea; today's trip starts in a place chosen more or less at random, westward more or less at random. I unload the bike at the Baarn train station, and immediately I'm riding through the cold Vuursche forest, through the tree-canopied village of Lage Vuursche, apparently a popular Sunday-morning pancake stop. Just outside the village's west edge, at the edge of a bike path, a mother and daughter shiver and hold a third bicycle while a man perhaps 50 meters away walks back to them. Behind him steams a patch of grass.

Past the noplace-with-a-name Hollandsche Rading, through the utterly nondescript town of Nieuw-Loosdrecht, and finally on a road through the middle of the Loosdrechtse Plassen, a wide very shallow pond lined with hundreds of large boats. The wealth in the piers is amazing. Never has so much tonnage tried to float on so little water.

It is still early morning when I roll past a busy local airport. I have to see: I turn back. I learned to fly a few years ago, in a place as mountainous as North Holland is flat. At least here you don't have to worry about the "clouds being full of rocks." Though quiet as it seems here, Schiphol airport, the world's seventh busiest, is uncomfortably close for my taste.
 

Other cyclists watch, too. Flying attracts all ages, but I gather it's mostly a "guy thing" here, too.
 

Somewhere on the road near Muyeveld. A snack somehow tastes better when your feet hang off a pier, over water.
 

You'll remember that the New York City area began Dutch. This Breukelen was first, though.
 

On Brooklyn's west side is the East River. On Breukelen's west side is the Amsterdam-Rijn (Rhine) canal.
 

The road along the Nieuwkoopse Plassen (essentially a swamp), west out of Noordse Buurt, was too narrow to share. I detoured toward Noordse Dorp. But halfway, a few meters before the old church, a causeway cut directly across the water, just a few centimeters above the water level. There was even a bench. I had lunch and read a few pages of Pascal with an extra shirt between me and the cold wind.
 

A long field near Aarlenderveen. This young woman will try something new in a few minutes. This guy is showing her how not to die.
 

Some are content to remain stuck in the mud and watch...
 

...But not her.
 

And westward to Alphen aan den Rijn and the train home. Not a big day's ride, not a heroic one--just very a pleasant one. Sometimes I wonder, though, how strange it is that this could have become everyday to me.