Day 1 – On The Road At Last

Today we were picked up by Robert who was the shipping agent for the bike. He drove us 50klms to where his small company had the bike stored. He has also stored the crate for the duration of our journey. We were blown away with his willingness to help and all at no extra cost to us. Maybe we’d already paid for it but I doubt it because the shipping was a very good price already.

It took me a couple of hours to fit everything back onto the bike and pack all of our gear but finally at 1pm we were on the road. With Norma in my intercom I got used to the right hand side of the road riding pretty quick.

First thing to do was to get fuel. 5klms up the road. Only problem is that I found we only had 4klms of fuel on board. Coasted for 500mtrs and pushed it the rest of the way. In 28c that was a good workout 🙂

Fueled up at twice the Aussie price and on the road with TomTom Mobile Go leading the way. I’d selected avoid motorways and tolls so we travelled some absolutely lovely countryside and through some typical Dutch villages, narrow roads, bikes again, little cars and ‘look at that’, ‘how quaint is that’ etc.

No motorways meant some ferries because believe me there’s waterways everywhere so we did 2 ferry crossings.

And where there’s water in Holland there’s windmills right. Well we’ve got to see some of those, so we did.

It’s quite fascinating to ride the dikes that keep the country from drowning. The work that has gone into controlling water in this country is phenomenal. Consider this;   when we landed at Amsterdam International the inflight display showed we were 6mtrs below sea level. So keep your finger in that dike young man.

 

So here we are at our AirBnB in Vianen for the night. Only 127klms today but quite slow a lot of the time.

Tomorrow it’s into Belgium

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