the beginning of the end

Rain threatening all Saturday morning, low clouds blowing across the sky just overhead, wind lashing all the tall, skinny, still-bare trees. A fine spring day.

Sunday promised to be worse, and I wasn't up for another museum, and I sure did not want to waste away in the apartment all weekend. I'd rather chance a ride today and waste away tomorrow with sore legs. The bike map showed a monster gap in my North Sea rides. The wind is out of the south-west--perfect! Load up and ride to Naarden-Bussum station, through Gouda (of cheese fame)...

...and disembark in Den Haag. The Hague. 'S-Gravenhage. All the same town. In one of Nestled among the pictured buildings, war criminals from the world over learn their fates. The Queen's home town.
 

A rather American-looking and American-paced city, by Dutch standards. I'm not sure I get the joke behind the zebra clock, though. Even zebras are punctual here? Black and white, to honor Toleration Nation? Anyway, this is a far cry from Anna Paulowna station.
 

There's an ANWB store nearby, and I need some maps for future rides. I ride over. Most ANWB stores are just a few aisles, but this one is a large, open rotunda dominated by a large-multistory building. ANWB shield on top. I realize this is the ANWB headquarters. And they STILL don't have all the maps I need--can't be bothered running inventory once a year.

And back at the bike shelter the sky splits open and dumps serious rain. For 30 minutes. For nearly an hour. At the first lessening, I head for the station to wait it out or just buy a ticket back home. But by the time I wheel around the station plaza, it lets up. Patches of blue in the sky. I'm still soaked, but I'm going to be soaked on the bike or on a train, so I head north, to Wassenaar and the North Sea coast. Updated bike map HERE (82 kB), this ride and last Wednesday evening's short ride to Sloterdijk in red.

Just at the north edge of Den Haag, I cross a wide American-style divided highway, and at a wide gate entrance are two policemen casually lugging machine guns. I veer right and wave--they wave back. Far enough away, I stop and check the map: Huis ten Bosch. House in the woods. The Queen's place.

It must be interesting to live on the south side of Wassenaar. You bike up a path, and every driveway has a small, polished, discreet sign something like: Residence of the Ambassador of the Republic of Korea. A small home the size of an airline hangar. Many, many other nice houses too, like the pictured. Check the wind: you'll be pleased to know that my ride is from left to right, not the opposite.
 

And at the end of Wassenaarse Slag, near the North Sea coast, the landscape turns positively lunar. The soil is so poor and salty that nothing can live. Dune country, but not the lush, Van Gogh dunes of farther north.
 

These dunes offer nothing to see, and they go on and on. Beautiful in a terrible sort of way.
 

Eventually the dunes give onto Katwijk, which I may have to add to my favorite Dutch cities. It is hard to imagine a beach town--quiet, gently laid out--more different than crappy Scheveningen only 10 km away.
 

 

On the north end of Katwijk is this panorama: the disconcerting mouth of the Rijn (Rhein) river. All the history, all the legend, all the towns with Rhein in the name, all the industrial might along its banks--and it is dumped this way into the North Sea. Well...the Dutch are stupendous engineers, not sentimentalists.
 

And a few km farther north, Noordwijk. Supposedly a twin beach town to Katwijk, but you know how twin towns are often different. Katwijk is what a Corsican beach town would look like if it had money, lots and lots of old, private, quiet money. Noordwijk, though, looks like it's trying to be as tacky as Atlantic City. I joked to the Dutch at work that I even expected little Noordwijk to get a casino before long, and they groaned that I was probably right. Oops.

North of another, more heavily built beach town Zandvoort ("sand castle", pictured in far background), the dunes turn grassy, taller, and quite beautiful.
 

 

I debate with myself about taking one last back and forth down a dead-end gravel bike path, far west and against the wind, to the North Sea. I had gotten a late start today, later still due to the rain in Den Haag. And I am still a long way from Driehuis station, which I must make if I am to close the gap in my bike map, if I am to see the whole coastline. It is dark enough that pictures are difficult, and taking the last path up and back will cost me an hour. I'm not sure how late the trains run in rural Driehuis. Then--I am probably never going to be on this particular bike path again. I turn west. I have to ride slowly and cramped, and my sore legs struggle to pedal against the coastal wind, I'm balancing on soft gravel, then shoving the bike up the steep last beach dune 15 meters / 50 feet high, up through the very soft sticky sand. Just when I think I won't make it, the whole thing opens before me. No one else around, the sun breaking through the cloud bank and onto the water.
 

You can see the wheel track. That's as far as I got. I want to watch, but I really, really have to turn back, and soon. I pace, and then I tear myself away. This was a kind of endpoint. I'd gotten as far as I could get, and the rest of the trip is somehow just a returning home. I wrestle the bike back towards where I came from and push hard through the sand. How was this trip so short? For a long time, I had ridden as though the ride would never end, but soon it will be all packing and timetables and rushing and waiting in lines. I want to stay here, and I look back over my shoulder for a last look. This place can stay and be its beautiful self, but I have to go.
 

And what's true of this ride is also, now, true of my stay in the Netherlands.