Our day began in Makkum, and we rode past some farmland (par for the course),
and under a railroad,
to a windmill (also par for the course!) by the shore of a lake.
A short while later, we came to a small river that we crossed by ferry!
The ferry was operated “as needed” as opposed to on a schedule. When we arrived, we could see Parke and Sarah on the opposite shore, and the ferry came for us straightaway. If you look at the track carefully, you can see a little S-shaped curve at that point.
We made it to a lovely town, Workum, and ate our packed lunch in the company of a very vocal jackdaw
After lunch, we rode on to Hindeloopen, a very scenic coastal town, and we went to the First Frisian Ice Skating Museum which had an amazing collection of old skates, and uniforms of famous skaters, etc.
And then we made our way back to Enkhuizen, with Matt at the helm (for part of the way)
where this whole thing started (well, the sailing and biking part anyway).
Tonight is our last night on board, tomorrow we will have our final breakfast on the boat, and then we must be packed and off the boat by 9:30. But we still have a few days to explore Amsterdam ahead of us.
Today we headed out from Harlingen and biked to Franiker, which besides being a cute town, hosts the oldest working planetarium, built between 1774 and 1781 by Eise Eisinga
as a hobby. He was university educated, but worked as a wool carder by day. Both the museum and the planetarium were amazing.
From there, we headed towards the town of Kimswerd, down a lovely bike path (fietspad)
with a suspension bridge!
We came to the famous statue of Grutte Pier (Great Peter),
outside the Sint-Laurentiuskerk church, built in the 11th century.
We had our lunch on a bench outside the church, then we rode on to the Afsluitdijk museum, right on the dike that separates the IJsselmeer from the Wadden Sea. It was interesting to read and see about the Netherlands’ history with water management. We had some awesome views from the roof.
And then we headed to the boat, newly docked in Makkum, after another long (30+ mile) day of cycling!
Today we made a bike tour of the island of Terschelling. We left after breakfast, around 9:00, with Susan looking super cute in her biking gear,
and made our way around most of the island. Our first stop was the Berry Barn
There is an interesting history of how cranberries ended up on the island. We didn’t stay there long, but we did come back to it later in the day. After that, we made our way across the island to the North Sea, and dipped our toes in the water. The wind was pretty fierce over there, and the waves were big and choppy.
There were people there getting ready to take advantage of the wind, with various wind-driven apparatus, and we dipped our toes (or calves) in. It was surprisingly warm!
We then rode along beautiful dunes, and through forests, and made our way to a very curious museum filled with stuff that washed ashore and that was collected by beachcombers. It was an astounding collection.
After the museum, we headed to the southern coast, and rode along the dike for a stretch
then headed back to the Berry Barn for a quick break, then back to the boat before it departed at 4:00. We sailed back to the mainland, and landed at Harlingen after an amazing vegetarian dinner on board. We were able to walk around the pretty little town for a bit
This morning we set sail for Terschelling! The pre-breakfast coffee line was long today…
After breakfast, the crew guided us through the process of raising and setting all the sails, and we are under wind power towards our next destination. While the boat is a flat bottom boat, and we have only 1.6m of draft, the channel we have available to us is pretty shallow, less than 1.6m at low tide, so the navigation is challenging enough without having to tack. We go when the tide is rising, so that the current flowing in from the North Sea also helps push us along.
We spent the morning and the early part of the afternoon under sail as long as we could, but then we furled the sails and made it the rest of the way under engine power.
The chef fed us a big lunch, and the crew expertly docked the boat in West Terschelling. We were able to spend the rest of the afternoon exploring the town, and hiking up to the top of the hill and back down to the Brandaris Lighthouse in the center of town. We ended up having a light dinner with the Candells, then walked back to the boat, just as a light rain was starting.
Tomorrow we will explore more of the island by bike. It is expected to be windy again!
We are docked at the island of Texel, and had our usual breakfast, then headed out on our bikes.
We rode into a nearby town, Den Burg, where there is an open market on Monday mornings
From the market, we rode on to a local chocolate shop, where they make fancy chocolates
Our next target was the Eierland Lighthouse, which has some interesting history from the WWII era. It was a long ride, and we decided to take the less scenic route, just up the middle of the island on regular roads. We had a good strong wind (but not as strong as the day before) in our faces, which made it pretty challenging. We ended up needed a bio break en route, and found a cute family dairy farm that doubled as a minor tourist attraction with an ice cream shop that satisfied all our immediate needs.
After a short break there, we headed on to the lighthouse.
When we got there, we had to buy tickets, but were then allowed to climb the 120ish steps
At the top, we were able to see the old control room and get a great view of the surrounding area
At the beach, there were people riding carts around the sand, that were being pulled by kites — very cool!
We then had a long ride back to the boat, but the first section was on a bike path through the dunes of Texel, which was amazing, and so much more enjoyable than the ride up the roads against the wind
Tomorrow is a sailing day, and we (well, the crew) will get the boat from Texel to Terschelling, and we get a day off from biking.
Today we started on the real work of this vacation — cycling! We had a small breakfast on the boat, and were able to pack a sandwich for lunch. We had our bike orientation, and Susan was given an e-Bike, and I got a “traditional” bike. We headed out from Enkhuizen and mostly followed along the coastline.
It was a very windy day today, and we were fighting it most of the way, with occasional breaks provided by trees. We got lovely views of the water,
and saw lots of people taking advantage of the wind by kite boarding, and other wind/board sports.
We saw our boat, motoring to our meeting point
We got to the destination town, Medemblik, by around noon, and were able to watch our crew very impressively “park” the boat.
After that, we rode down the main street of the town, and found a restaurant for lunch. After lunch, came the obligatory ice cream, then we took a brief look at the local castle, where Matt and Susan showed off their balancing skills
before heading back to the boat.
The rest of the day was a pretty relaxed affair, for us anyway, but we got to see the crew navigate through a lock,
and a center-pivot swing bridge, which was pretty nifty. We were served dinner as the boat was nearing the island of Texel, where we will be for the next two nights.
We went away this weekend to spend time with two other couples, and log some good biking in Western Mass. We rented a house in Amherst that was near the Mass Central Rail Trail. Late on Saturday morning, we hopped on our bikes and rode 14 miles to the Williamsburg Snack Bar where we had a lovely lunch, after which we turned around and headed back.
About halfway back, a large tree root that made a good sized bump in the trail caught me off guard, and I lost control of the bike, and fell. Thankfully, I fell in the dirt and weeds along the side and not on the pavement. The image above is of my shin, which is the most photogenic of my scars. Beyond that, my hip has a lovely bruise that is just starting to blossom a day later, and my shoulder, was pretty well wrenched from the incident. Nothing broken, but my ego probably suffered the most. (Shoulder is pretty painful, though). All my companions were very concerned and supportive, and helped pick up all the bits and pieces that came off the bike.
Since nothing on the bike or me was actually broken, after a few minutes of calming down, I got back on the bike and rode the rest of the way home, knowing that at some point in the near future, everything would stiffen up and feel a lot worse. The rest of the ride was, happily, uneventful.
At the encouragement of everyone, I let Susan take me to the clinic. We got in the car, and the directions told us it was 0.1 miles away. In the end, it probably would have been faster to walk, it was so close! They took some X-rays of the shoulder and saw nothing to be concerned about, and recommended ibuprofen, arnica gel, and icing.
For dinner, we walked a little ways past the clinic and had beers and appetizers at the Hangar Pub and Grill, which is home to the Amherst Brewing Company, so we were able to get our passports stamped there. Then we had a lovely dinner at the Amherst Public House. When we were done with dinner, it was raining pretty hard, so the walk back was, um, refreshing?
And then there were board games.
The next day, the rest of the crew did another ~30 mile ride. Even without the accident, it’s doubtful that Susan or I would have felt up to another big ride. Instead, we went to visit the Beneski Museum of Natural History at Amherst College,
which had a very manageable collection of minerals, fossils, etc. We enjoyed about 2 hours there, and then headed to Tree House Brewing Company in Deerfield.
So this is not their flagship location in Charlton, but a newer facility. I’d always heard great things about their beer, but not so great stories about the Charlton facility, which could be overcrowded, with long lines, long waits, etc. Having never been to their Charlton facility, I can’t compare them; I can only say that our experience was great. The facility is huge, and it took some time to walk from the ample parking lot to the sunny, air-conditioned atrium taproom. We arrived shortly after they opened (noon), and were able to walk right up to the bar and order a beer without waiting, and then order a pizza, which was ready in about 15 minutes. The beer was terrific, and the pizza was very good. And we were able to get our passports stamped as well!
A truly enjoyable weekend, with but one blemish. If I had been more alert, or less tired, it probably wouldn’t have happened at all. I’m grateful that my body took this more or less in stride, and seems to be recovering. It won’t be as fast as it would have been in my twenties, but that’s life.
This autumn, I’ve had three good friends suffer falls and injuries from their bike slipping on ice. Probably a decade ago, I had a similar incident, on the Minuteman Bike Trail, where I was turning to go around the gates they had setup at the time, and my front wheel slipped right out from under me. My shoulder went directly into the bollard. I wasn’t going fast at the time, but it hurt like heck, and I could barely move my arm. I limped home on the bike from there, and wondered whether I’d broken anything, but nothing seemed broken. After a couple of days, I could move my arm again reasonably.
Susan and I share one car, which basically means that if one person has the car, the other is left with a bike. (Or walking, or public transit, all of which are reasonable options around here, thankfully). Not wanting to relive my previous experience, with bones a decade more brittle, and after seeing so many other experienced cyclists go down, I decided to set myself up with a second set of wheels, with studded tires.
I first spent some time researching what I had on my existing back wheel for sprockets, and started looking for used wheels on eBay and Craigslist, but it’s a little complicated and hard to be 100% certain that everything would work together. So in the end, I opted for new wheels. I was super excited when they came, but when I opened the boxes, I discovered that I had ordered wheels with nutted axles instead of quick release. Thankfully, even though it was my mistake, the shop allowed me to return them, and refunded me, and I ordered the proper wheels.
So when the new order arrived, I thought I had everything I needed: wheels, tires, tubes, cassette. But I didn’t have rim tape. So I had to go to the local bike shop for that. The owner there was nice enough to install it on the one wheel that I brought, and sent me home with a second piece for the other wheel. And then the tubes. The tubes I bought had “normal” length stems, but the rims are slightly aero, so the stems are barely long enough — really hard to get the pump to grab on. Sigh. But now I have a set of winter wheels, and hopefully that greatly reduces the chance of slipping and tumbling.
It would of course have been possible to just replace the tires on the existing rims, at much lower cost. The tires themselves are not particularly inexpensive, so this was a pretty costly endeavor — about $400 when you add it all up. I just doubted my ability to follow through and actually swap tires twice a year. Swapping wheels seems a lot more likely.
It’s my old Garmin eTrex! A friend’s son is going to be working at Garmin for the summer, and I was reminiscing about my long history with their products. This was my first — the original eTrex. I can still remember going to a MacWorld exhibition back in 1989 or 1990 and seeing a Sony GPS unit (yes, Sony!). It must have been a Pyxis model, though my recollection was that the antenna unit was spherical rather than just round. Could be faulty memory, or might have been a prototype unit. More likely the former. Anyway, it was of course super expensive, and there was no way I would be able to afford such a thing, but the concept of a (semi) portable device that could tell you (fairly) precisely where you were anywhere on earth seemed pretty magical.
In any case, GPS technology continued to evolve, and a newish company, Garmin, was producing some interesting devices. A lot of the early devices were aimed at the boating market, where LORAN had been the previous popular means of electronic navigation. There were some handheld units, but the eTrex was (I would say) the first reasonably priced, handheld GPS receiver, oriented towards hiking. And so, I bought one. I used it for hiking, and even toyed with connecting it up with a PocketPC via a cable purchased from a “pfranc” (Purple Open Project Franchisee). If you have a few minutes, the history of those 3rd-party connectors is really fascinating and fun, and Larry Berg is a great example of a hacker’s hacker. I remember being completely absorbed by the story back then, but eventually I lost track of him, and he apparently passed away in 2012. But the other thing the cable was useful for was powering the eTrex in the car. I could also connect it to a laptop via a serial port (and later, a USB-to-RS-232 converter). Because, of course, the eTrex had no built-in mapping capability. It could just tell you where you were. And via a “breadcrumb trail” function, where you’d been. And store waypoints. And point you in the precise direction of a waypoint and tell you how far it was. But it had no concept of roads, or trails, or anything other than location: current, previous, and preset waypoints. But this was enough! I recorded many hikes with my beautiful yellow eTrex that I could then save and post, and overlay the breadcrumb trail on top of topo maps, etc.
The eTrex was a miracle of technology, but still showed some weaknesses that were common among early GPS receivers. It could take quite some time to get a signal, and it required quite a clear view of the sky in order to receive the signal reliably. For the many years that it was my hiking GPS, you would see me with the unit balanced on top of my hat. No doubt this helped improve my posture. Many times I thought about velcroing it there, but I never actually did.
One of the great things about GPS was that, being a government designed technology, the standards were published, and while different companies might well choose to implement proprietary physical connectors to their device, the data coming from those devices was all standard, so if you wrote an app to interface with one GPS, with very minor exceptions, you could interface with all of them. A great example of the value of standards!
After the eTrex, I eventually bought an Edge 705, which was oriented towards biking, and could interface with a cadence meter, a wheel tachometer to more accurately calculate speed, and a heart rate monitor. This had several advantages over the eTrex — it had USB connectivity (via a standard connector, even — way to evolve, Garmin!!), and a rechargeable battery. It had much quicker startup times, and had a much more sensitive receiver. So much so that it spent most of its time in my pocket, resulting in a screen that has suffered many scratches from other pocket paraphernalia. But most of all, it had a mapping capability! I could load street maps on it, and it could calculate routes. I could load topo maps on it, and see what the trail ahead looked like, etc. It even had a color screen! Even after I had a phone that could also do all these things, I still carried the Edge. It did much better with battery life, and it meant I could leave my phone in airplane mode to conserve its battery, and have it available for emergencies.
But the beautiful thing is that, after 20+ years, the thing still works. Once I cleaned out the leaked battery acid from old alkalines (Duracell, even!), and popped in a fresh pair of AAs, the thing booted up and found the requisite “birds” and was able to give me a location. As always, it had to be outdoors to get a good enough view of the sky, but it still works! I Love It!
This past weekend, Susan and I drove to the northwest corner of Massachusetts, to a town named North Adams, [geo_mashup_map] as a last chance vacation before school begins. This year, only one of us is actually going back to school, Susan, to teach eighth grade science again. Even Clara, who is still in school at NU, is on co-op this semester. And Susan will in fact be teaching from home. But before things begin in earnest (classes don’t begin until 21 September!) there is all kinds of teacher training and stuff to prepare everyone for the most bizarre fall in living memory. So we wanted to get away, even if it was only for two days, and still in state (to follow quarantine guidelines!)
We drove out late Saturday morning, stopping at Herrick’s Tavern for a nice, outdoor lunch. Herrick’s has been one of our favorite stops on the way home from frisbee tournaments, back when that was a thing.
See? I told you it was Herrick’s
When we arrived in North Adams, our AirBnB host greeted us warmly, and over the next half hour we learned most of his life story, some interesting tidbits about the town (where almost all his story took place), and precious little about the apartment. We unpacked the van, and then went walking around the center of town, and did a bit of grocery shopping. After putting away groceries, we headed out to the local brewery, Bright Ideas, for some beer and BBQ from A-OK Barbecue. Good beer and tasty food!
On Sunday, after a home breakfast, we ventured out on our bikes! First, we headed back east, and rode out to Natural Bridge State Park, where we enjoyed learning about and seeing the after effects of marble mining. The marble from there is not terribly fine, and apparently much of it, especially in later years, was simply ground up into calcium carbonate powder for all kinds of uses. But the park was lovely, and the natural bridge was certainly something to see. Most importantly, Susan got to scratch her geological itch a bit, and hug a rock.
I love you. You are my rock.
We rode back home, and had a home lunch, and then got right back on our saddles and headed west to hike the Cascade Trail. It is a modest trail, mostly following alongside a brook, and leading up to a lovely waterfall. It being the dry season, the falls were hardly dramatic, but still picturesque:
Not much water, but enough to cause falls
After hiking back down to the elementary school where we parked our bikes, and riding back to our AirBnB, we cleaned up and headed out for dinner. We had planned to walk over to the nice Italian restaurant in town, but they are apparently only open Wednesday through Saturday, so we had to find an alternative. OpenTable suggested the Freight Yard Pub, and we called and made a quick reservation, as we were uncertain how crowded it might be. When we arrived (by car, and the only use of the car in town until then) about 15 minutes later, we were able to get a table on the patio right away (would have been fine even without a reservation). Susan’s steak tips were very good, and even the mixed vegetables accompanying the tips were notably flavorful. I enjoyed the fajitas I ordered, though something disagreed with my tummy later in the evening.
The next morning, Monday, we went out for breakfast to Renee’s, which Scott had recommended. It was a lovely restaurant, with recently expanded outdoor seating, and we enjoyed a nice relaxed breakfast, before packing up and heading home. Really home.
North Adams was a lovely, scenic little town in the Berkshires. We enjoyed the two days we spent there. The downtown area was rather depressed though. A non-scientific survey suggests about half the storefronts are closed. How much of that is due to the Covid-19 pandemic I don’t know. I only know it can’t have helped.
