Almost there and a soon reversed smug feeling.

And so we are in Holland, having passed through a very mundane border area which appeared to be just on the edge of somebody's house


Shall we go Dutch or German today? Let's go German as the supermarkets and the bread is better.......


As you might expect, a lot of flat land, but not, necessarily without hills. Yesterdays journey was ( again according to the guide book) undulating, and yet we did as much climbing as we had done in Switzerland. This was not helped by having to take a detour in Waginengen, where a 4km time trial of a woman's cycle tour was taking place. And yes, the detour was up a hill......


Just before leaving Germany we stayed in a very quiet little campsite, and treated ourselves to two enormous steaks at the campsite restaurant. Run by a father and daughter team who were all smiles at the inevitable malpronuciation of "medium rare" in German that I had just looked up on google translate, they were worked off their feet by the arrival of a gaggle of bike tourists who had just turned up. It took therefore a wee while before our food turned up, which just made it all the more fantastic. Not a morsel left.


The weather has been dry and hot up till now but it's made the cycling tiring. We have now got a well rehearsed routine for pitching the tent, and it's about half an hour now from arrival to sitting on our chairs with the pan of water on the stove for coffee/tea.


One great thing about Germany that we haven't found in Holland are the bakeries with coffee shops combined. The bakeries in Holland tend to be a bit more highbrow with impeccably packaged cakes etc, and no sign of a coffee machine.


Setting off in the morning from a very quiet dutch campsite where our only company was three Polish blokes whom we assume were farm labourers. Their tent appeared to have given up any semblance of being waterproof, and was just a melange of different coloured tarpaulins. The car likewise was a mixture of different coloured body panels, and sounded like a spaceship taking off in the morning.





I have intriguingly entitled this picture "Cows in the water". When I first passed this scene, I stopped and went back to take the picture, by which time they had marched off out the water. "Oh fiddle" I said, annoyed at the missed opportunity. Cycled back about 200m to Sian, about to go, and they all went back in. So back I went, and this time they remained put.


This is a nuclear power station that never was- after Chernobyl this was never put into action and is now a theme park. Coming out of the cooling tower is a carousel ride.

And here we are now. Oh - and the smug feeling? Managed to get everything packed up in the dry this morning before the heavens opened. But not so smug now, as in our hurry to get going this morning we forgot the golden rule- check the camping area. So we left 10 of our tent pegs 50km away........

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