Friday 22 May 2009

Cycling against the wind

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Texel


I've just recently come back from a week on the island of Texel in the Netherlands.

Kristine and I were joined by my parents for a week of walking and cycling on Texel which is one of the string of islands in the Friesians group. We had a small bungalow a couple of kilometres from the village of De Koog, not far from the North sea coast and the Texel Dunes National Park.

We were pretty fortunate with the weather as it hardly rained at all and was generally quite sunny. Our main problem was the wind which was quite fierce at times and often a struggle to cycle against.

To get there and back proved quite an adventure in itself as we started the day with a bus and then a tram to Antwerp before catching a train to Amsterdam. from there we changed trains to Den Helder, followed by a short bus ride to the dock. The ferry ride itself was a very short 15 minutes and once on the island we took a taxi to our destination. about 6 hours door-to-door.

The owners of the bungalow were there to welcome us and show us around and then were kind enough to drive us all to De Koog so we could hire our bicycles for the week. We dropped into the supermarket for some shopping before riding back to our new base; a reide of about 15 or 20 minutes.

On most days we left the house between 9 and 10am to start a day's cycling - though on one day we did rather more walking than cycling. Generally we would be back home between 4 and 5pm to relax and prepare the evening meal.

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More to follow.

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