Beach Ride!

On Saturday, the sun was brightly shining and it was the warmest day of the year so far! It was 22 degrees Celsius, which for those non-metric system users (aka every sane person in America :) ), it translates into 71 degrees Fahrenheit. It was beautiful. So what better way to spend the day but biking to the beach in Nordvijk!! We are pretty close to it and the trip allowed us to bike through parts of Holland I hadn't seen before.

Right after we got out of the city limits of Leiden, some boys-who will remain unnamed but both might have been the only 2 American men with us, started their horseplay. Despite Kimberly's best efforts to reign them in with her teacher's voice, someone got hurt. Ed's bike. His brakes were basically rammed off the wheel. So for the rest of the ride (and remember, we were only 2km into it, so total round trip, we still had about 26km more to go), Ed was grabbing onto others for dear life when faced with sudden stops. The rest of the time we all yelled out "Braaaaaake"! to give him time to Fred Flinstone it and use his feet. We were determined to get to the beach.

We passed some beautiful flower fields. The tulips weren't up yet but you could see them getting ready to bloom. The other flower fields were just as beautiful with their rows and rows of colorful blooms.

We were very close to our destination and it hardly seemed like we had been biking long at all. That is the great thing about biking in the Netherlands-no hills!! But just shy of the beach, we came across a mini-golf place. Naturally we had to stop and play a round. I lost horribly but I believe I was thrown off by the ridiculousness of the Dutch "midget-golf" course. Each hole ran into the next one so if you would go to hit your ball and you overshot the hole (which, you do on nearly every first shot) your ball would roll onto the next green, where someone might be getting ready to take their shot. So we had to implement a system where a few of us would stand at the end of the hole and guard our ball from going onto the next green. Annoying, to say the least.

But after mini-golf, we were beach bound! It was amazing, we came through a parking lot and BAM, there was the North Sea! Tons of seaside restaurants, people sunbathing, children swimming in the water (even though it was only 70 degrees and we are as far north as Canada, making the water pretty chilly). It was beautiful!! We had lunch at a beachside restaurant and then made our way to the water. No one but me wanted to get their feet wet. Weird right? I mean, we were at the NORTH SEA for the first time!!! But I had a fabulous time and splashed around as much as one can who hds no friends in with her and who was freezing.

Then we decided to take a different route back so we could bike along the coastal route and go through Katvijk (another seaside community). While this seemed like a great decision at the time, once we got going we realized that there are in fact about 4 km worth of hills in the Netherlands and we were biking them! We followed a path through sand dunes, that had all of us shouting at the injustice it was that the country had tricked us into believing that riding your bikes was a great means of transportation. Then we finally exited the sand dunes and all was right with the world again and we continued on our flat way home. Once we got through Katvijk, which is about 9km from Leiden, we all started to feel the burn in our bums. We prayed there wouldn't be red lights that would force us to have to get off of our bikes. As long as we didn't lift up or move in any way, we were all right.  But one wrong move up or to the left or right, shot shooting pains through our backsides.

By the time we got home ,we were tired, sunburnt, sore, and ready to plop down on a doughnut pillow. It was a fabulous day. One of my best days in the Netherlands I think. I can't wait to go back with a picnic lunch, when the tulips are in full bloom.

Here are a few pics from our trip!