Attentive readers will be aware that yesterday was our last cycling day of the first week's tour, and as such, it being a loop, we are back where we started at the Hotel de Harmonie, Giethoorn, and reunited with the Volvo. We must have made a good impression at the start of the week as we now have a room with a view and plenty of natural light.
You may also have noticed that in the centre of the picture there is a one-hole golf course. It's appears to be the "difficult 1st hole" as it's surrounded on 3 sides by water. I think it belongs to the house next door, but in all our time here nothing has stirred on it apart from a very large goose that spends most of it's time attending to The Green.
We wrestled the Tandem into the car last night, and even with both wheels removed and wedged in diagonally it would be easy to break something valuable on the bike if you shut the boot too hard. I've always said that there's nothing wrong with the Volvo that being six inches longer wouldn't fix...
Today we have only one "must-do" on our list, and that is to get ourselves to our next overnight stop before 10pm when they lock the doors for the night. It's only three hours drive away at most, notwithstanding that starting Thursday this is a big public holiday weekend for the Dutch when they all get into their cars or boats and head for the coast it seems. We had to be out of the hotel by 11am so we chose to fill our time by driving back to Orvelte, the restored village that we visited in the rain on Tuesday as there were a few things in the shops there that we quite liked but could not have brought home on the bike. (For the record, the Noddy Holder elf wasn't one of them.)
From Orvelte, the thatched bandstand of the day:
and a pretty barn
I'll just drop a "Windmill of the day" in here, dead casual like..:
I now realise that we didn't post a WOTD last Wednesday, so you can have this one from the windmill archive, taken on a day when we saw several (Sat 28th seeing as you asked,) as it was quite close to the one above:
There was a notice board nearby that says that the simple one moved about 25 cubic meters (ie metric tonnes) of water per hour, but the other moved about 480 t/hr, not bad for the mid-17th century.
We used some of the cycling route maps to get us to Orvelte, and by chance, found ourselves in a modest example of one of those "big open spaces with a big sky above" that I wrote about in passing early in our adventure. Today I took a couple of pictures to try and give you some idea of what I meant. They were taken looking away from the road, one each side of it:
We had, stupidly, looked in the window of the local pottery when we took our customary after-dinner constitutional around Dwingaloo, and, like the fools that we indubitably are, we went back there "just to have a look" as we were passing. What could possibly go wrong..?
Several hours later we emerged, having made some new friends, acquired some pottery, and most likely a 16 year old house-guest, hello Thijs, (pr'n Teese for our English readers, as in Thijs van Leer, obviously) for a fortnight later in the year as he needs to improve his English. Can't think why, it seemed alright to me; he should have a listen to my French sometime. (Apparently I sound American to the Dutch. I suppose that's only fair, the Minnesotans all thought I was Swedish.) Anyhoo, here they are, the family van den Brink...
Now if any of you have any ideas for ways to fill a few days for someone who actually wants to spend his time being amongst the English, talking and listening to the language as much as possible, (Dutch teenagers aren't like English ones,) please get in touch with your suggestions, by email or the comments section below.
Sadly we had to decline their offers of supper as we had a motorway to use, and as it turned out we arrived in our next destination with only a quarter of an hour to spare, but that, gentle reader, is a story for another day...
Night night.
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