I had a rotten night’s sleep after pumping up the sleeping mat twice but I’ve been there before and I’ll sort it out.
I decided instead of camping, that I’d try and stay with a warmshowers host, and as luck would have it, a host in Gouda was happy to have me stay.
I received that message after about 5kms of riding. It was perfect timing, so I rerouted to Gouda, and plotted an interesting route with villages and a couple of ferries. I felt great and pushed off, forgetting that my sunnies were resting on the handlebars. They didn’t just fall harmlessly to the ground. Oh no, that would be too easy. They fell, so that as I turned, the back wheel ran over them, dislodging a lens and breaking one of the arms clean off. Normally, you don’t need them in Holland, but these days, it’s really sunny and warm.
The rest of the day was villages and ferries and speaking to friendly locals. I arrived in Gouda a couple of hours before I needed to, so I rode around, had an ice cream, then a coffee and a toastie. Toasties have been few and far between since I left Aus.
Then it was time to go to my hosts for the night. I was using warmshowers.org which is a kind of couchsurfing for touring cyclists. I’d never really used it before even though friends had recommended it as a nice way to travel. So, I grabbed a very nice bottle of wine, from the Awatere Valley in NZ, just near where I cycled in February, and joined the peak hour cyclists for the short trip out of central Gouda.
Jolanda and Dries were absolutely lovely people. They accepted me on short notice (I only requested it this morning) and we had a nice dinner outside. The rest of the evening was spent talking about travel – I thoroughly enjoyed their company as well as the discussion and these nice people have certainly made me feel like using warmshowers.org again.
Thanks Jolanda and Dries !!
The next day, I made the short, early trip to my old friends Paul and Marlies, it was so so nice to see them and their son Jeroen. We spent the day wandering around Haarlem before heading back to Zevenhuizen. Just like in Zwolle, it was a day of laughing and talking and just catching up on the more than 15 intervening years since I last saw them (well, … It’s only 2 years since Jeroen was in Sydney). They’re great people.