kayak shopping and hiking

Little flowers are starting to bloom.


This windmill was one of the points of interest on our hike. These are the kind of windmills they use to pump the water up and out of the fields.



You can see that the sheep are in a soggy field. We were standing on top of a dyke with a bigger canal behind us. The water level of the big canal was about 10 feet higher than this farm field.



Dennis and I are thinking about getting a kayak. With so much water around, it would be fun to explore by kayak. I did a search on the internet and found a kayak store about 30 minutes drive from here. It’s just on the other side of Amsterdam. Dennis and I drove over there on Saturday just to see what they have. This store was HUGE! We found a very helpful salesman who showed us the different types of kayaks they have and told us about all the other junk you need to buy. We are still trying to decide if we want two single kayaks or one double kayak. We are checking with coworkers to see if we find a used one for sale. What we buy might depend on what’s available. We also have to figure out how to carry a kayak on the car. The Toyota RAV4 is big enough to handle whatever we buy, but it doesn’t have a rack on top. Dennis will have to get that sorted out before we buy anything!

While we were up north for our kayak shopping, we decided to do a hike nearby. The Dutch equivalent of AAA publishes walking routes for all over the Netherlands. There is a book with descriptions of the walks and then a one page map for each hike giving all of the details including where to park. We had done two of the hikes already and found the routes to be nice and the maps accurate. Well, for this trip, we chose a 9 km walk around a polder (reclaimed land with lots of small canals). Since we did a 9km walk last weekend, we figured it would be no problem – a couple hours walking.

We got to our hiking start point, the town of De Rijp. It’s a very Dutch little town along the canals with cute bridges and narrow roads. We started out by having a cup of tea in a café. It was pretty quiet in the café and we were surprised to hear the couple next to us speaking English! It was strange to find other English speakers in such a small Dutch town. We said hello, but we were impatient to get started. By the time we got going it was 1:30 in the afternoon. We walked for about an hour and according to the map we were about 1/4th of the way done. This was my first clue that this hike was going to be a bit longer than advertised.

We kept walking, really enjoying the little flowers that are starting to bloom and the warm, spring-like temperatures. At 3:30, we pulled the sandwiches out of the backpack, but decided to eat while we walked. At 4:00, we saw a road sign indicating that De Rijp was still 4 km down the road. How can this be a 9 km hike if we still have 4 km to go? According to the map we are way more than halfway done. OK, now we’re doing the math. If we walk at 3 miles per hour for 3 hours, that makes the hike more like 9 miles, not 9 km. What the hell? The map also gives an estimate of how long it will take. They claimed this hike would be 2 ½ hours. Dennis was using the GPS the whole time, so we know that we didn’t get lost. In the end, we hiked for 3 ½ hours and when Dennis calculated the distance according to the GPS, it was 10.1 miles or 16.8 km.

We were kind of tired when we got back to the car. We still like the walking route maps, but from now on, we will check the route on the computer to verify the distance before we go. There’s a big difference between 9 km and 16.8 km!

On Sunday, we woke up to the sun. Yes, I said the SUN! Feeling energized by the sun, we decided to get the road bikes out for the first time this season. March 1 is a cool date to start with outdoor cycling! Of course, by the time we were ready, the clouds had started to come over. But we still had a nice ride and it wasn’t too cold. We went about 18 miles – so a pretty short ride. It felt great to be out on the road bike and now I’m looking forward to more nice weekends.