Too Cold

A ride Sunday, too. Rode up to Hoorn, a wonderful old shipping town turned slightly yuppie in the apartment area around the old harbors. The wind was whipping off the Zuider Zee. I started west to round the bay, then south. If it stayed dry enough, and warm enough, and the wind didn't turn against me, and if I made decent time, I would press on south to Amsterdam. Otherwise turn inland at Volendam to the train station at ugly Purmerend.

I tried to enjoy the ride, but in fact the wind turned against me, so that the wind chill on the bike was well below -10C/14F. Raising my face just made me colder, so I didn't even see very much. The cold hands just didn't want to come out of the gloves for the camera. The ride served mostly just to fill in the last gap on the west shore of the Zuider Zee (updated BIKE MAP (119 kB)).

This is pretty much what the whole ride looked like, anyway. The green area is a polder, a field well below sea level, that is, that used to be part of the Zuider Zee. The ditches are to drain the water to waiting pumps--and sometimes to separate flocks of sheep, cows, etc. The steeple in the background is that of the main church in the pleasant village of Edam. Yes, the very Edam for which the famous cheese is named.
 

Volendam (pictured) is one noisy, touristic strip of shops along the harbor, and the rest is streets and more streets full of faceless apartments stacked in drained seabed. See, Edam is the old town, built on a "ridge" of land just above sea level. Volendam's harbor area is high, too, but the rest just looks like former mosquito and swan country.
 

Volendam's church bells went crazy--exactly 4:00 by the GPS. By now it would be almost dark before I got to Amsterdam, and I wasn't even sure how to approach it, since I knew there was no bridge across the IJ to the station (Amsterdam Centraal). I turned inland to Purmerend, an awful instant bedroom town and light industrial purgatory. Not even a bike paths along the main roads. I cheated death to the weirdly named Purmerend Overwhere train station and hooked 'em home. Maybe my idea to delay the bike rides until it warmed up more was a pretty good idea.