A new bus service has started up in Kirkby Stephen since I was last here, and very useful it is too. I caught it to Wharton Fell and then walked back via Pendragon and Lammerside ruins. The slanting sunshine was beautiful, and I realised how spontaneous a boost it adds to the walk.
Continuing yesterday’s spirit of being sensible, I decided to walk towards (or even to) Nine Standards on Hartley Fell and back the same way, prepared to turn round if the path was too awful. I could see the stone piles on the skyline as I started up the bridlepath, and it seemed doable.
I almost baulked at a ford but found it manageable. My nemesis was the bridge close to the stones: it was under water and there was no other way without getting waterlogged boots. Since I was finding the walk a bit samey – a long trudge up on bare moorland into increasingly strong winds – I didn’t mind admitting defeat. I found a quiet spot to eat a banana and admire the view and then turned round. I think I saw a barn owl on the way down.
I’ve come to Kirkby Stephen to walk, and walk I shall – despite yesterday’s grim storm and today’s wind. Smardale was the sensible option: minor roads and low levels with the guarantee of a really satisfying view of the old railway viaduct. I set off after a breakfast so big that I didn’t bother to stop to eat en route and had an enjoyable day. I saw a red squirrel beside the old railway line and I disturbed a bird in the heather – black with its eye outlined in white, so I’m guessing a black grouse without its mating plumage.
The bare dog rose thorn reminded me of the potential harshness of winter. It’s hard to think of its bleakness when one is used to central heating and filled supermarket shelves.
After breakfast I walked around Gouda while it was quiet and dry. It’s stereotypically Dutch – cobbles, canals, gables that look good reflected in those same canals. The town hall, the cheese weighing house, the grote kerk, the fish market arcade beside the canal (like Delft) that I remembered from a previous visit – I walked round them all.
I caught the train to Rotterdam (a headwind and memories of the dull ride decided me) and started cycling from there, and now I’m in Maassluis again.
Another day of two halves: a morning ride through sandy woodlands that encouraged me to linger, followed by an afternoon of hard pedalling into a drizzly headwind as I misnavigated and realised that I still had miles to go. The wind is getting stronger and colder too; I turned right towards Oudewater and suddenly moved from a gruelling 7mph to an exhilarating – oooh! – 10mph or so as the wind caught my back.
At Zeist there was a big castle that I skirted round. Lots of forts south of Utrecht, and Nieuwegein and Ijsselstein had pretty old centres when I finally got through all their outskirts. I only really have time to stop for coffee and cake, but I did make exceptions for an undulating hedge dusted with fallen leaves and the biggest gathering of coots I’ve ever seen in one place. I had them down as unsociable birds: how wrong I was.
And so to Gouda. The light was fading as I arrived so I had no time to explore. In the evening I wandered out in search of something to eat; turning a corner, I suddenly found myself in the main square.
The tasting menu thing stretched to breakfast, which was definitely taking things too far! I had a full day’s cycling ahead and I wanted food, not dainty morsels displayed on stones and marble chips. Particularly not when the tastes include curry soup and goat’s cheese. Not flavours you want haunting you as you pedal along.
Unsurprisingly, I stopped at the first bakery I saw.
Zutphen is on the River Ijssel, which was very close to my hotel. Another pleasant – if damp and grey – ride through the sandy woodland and heath of the Veluwe.
It’s inevitable that I cross or repeat former rides as I cycle between Germany and Dutch ports. Today it was Building A of the transmitting station at Radio Kootwijk (1920) that got the second visit. This time I got the reflection in the reflecting pool. As I pedalled off I wondered if there was anything similar in Britain – Alexandra Palace, some of those place names on old radio dials like Droitwich? But actually I really don’t know the difference between a transmitting station, a radio mast and radio studios.
Once again, I realised I’d left myself with a lot to do in the afternoon. I arrived at my hotel at 4.30 p.m. with my lights on. It’s on the edge of Amersfoort, run by the International School for Philosophy. Each room is named after a philosopher: mine is Jean-Paul Sartre. As I walked along the corridor, past Wittgenstein, John Stuart Mill, Plato, Aristotle and Descartes, I found myself humming Bruces’ Philosophers Song from Monty Python.
In addition to train disruptions, the weather forecast is getting wetter, so I’ve decided to bunny-hop across the Netherlands. Bicycle-train-bicycle. Hopefully I’ll end up where I need to be and stay reasonably dry.
Today I left Rheine and followed a direct route to the Dutch border. Another grey, damp day, so more photos of orange leaves and winding routes (some of them obscured by said orange leaves). I swerved the centre of Bad Bentheim, got confused in Oldenzaal thanks to my navigation and another omleiding, and caught the train from Hengelo-Oost to Zutphen.
The Netherlands are much further along the everything-on-the-app route than Britain. I feel like the kid in class with the wrong trainers. Hengelo-Oost is a tiny station (easier to navigate with a bicycle) with a ticket machine that refused to accept either of my cards. I bought my ticket online instead but couldn’t see how to include a bicycle ticket. Unfortunately the emailed ticket is not the ticket – oh, no. You have to download it to the NS app . . . which I then acquired. But the ticket and the app refused to communicate – so, eventually, there I was, on a train with an invalid ticket for me and no bicycle ticket in a country where exiting bigger stations (e.g. Zutphen) is like Alcatraz unless you have the magic bar code.
I needn’t have worried after all: no ticket collectors, no barriers at the station, and a ticket machine that graciously allowed me to buy a bicycle ticket after the event. And I had time to wander around Zutphen before it went dark. Typical Dutch centre and a church that made me realise how building in brick allows you to build enormous multiple windows with more delicate supports than in stone. It makes the massive structures seem transparent.
Dinner in tonight’s hotel was a tasting menu. No choice (except that I specified no meat) so a succession of morsels was placed before me and described minutely. Dinner as performance, and I played along with it – noticing the flavours and eating more delicately than is my (bad) habit. An interesting experience but I’m not bothered about repeating it.
Old Shoe Box 