clairedavieswriter

All was not well in Team Bernard this morning. To be fair, it was our 28th, and if all goes to plan, our penultimate day of cycling, so perhaps we’re all just a little tired.
It started with Guillaume, who has been increasingly cranky of late. As I was getting ready to leave, he crossed his arms, set his jaw and said ‘Non’. I suspect he knew I’d been thinking of swapping him for a younger model, and had decided to take a leaf out of the Liège signalmen’s playbook. But if he’s serious about keeping his place in the squad, he really needs to rethink his tactics.
Hugo Headphones manfully stepped in, despite having gone through the wash with my jersey yesterday. But he must have got water in his ears, because his instructions were woolly at best. In particular, his understanding of left and right was decidedly poor for a tool whose sole purpose is to issue directions. So our ride was punctuated by a higher than average number of stops, to check exactly what Hugo meant, or to retrace our steps because he’d said right when he meant left. Bernard remained as uncomplaining as ever, even though his rear wheel was still giving him gyp.
In the cool of the early morning, we pedalled through shady avenues of trees:

Onto a dyke beside the Zwartwater, where the impressively athletic retirees of Zwolle were out rowing

And between low lying pastures brightened with splashes of colour:

After that, it felt like we were on a tour of parts of the UK, from the Norfolk Broads:

To the Somerset Levels

To the heathland of the New Forest

And even to Fleet Pond:

In between, we learned some important Dutch words

That prevented us from getting a bloody nose when the bridge opened

We also learned that the Dutch like to be precise: while we just have cattle grids, they have many kinds of rooster. We’ve already seen Wildrooster – literally, for game, but in practice for sheep – and Dassenrooster for badgers. Today it was finally the turn of a grid for actual cattle:

Two postal workers provided today’s addition to my growing collection of ‘Dutch people riding side by side’ photos

But this was my sight du jour:

After 28 days on the road, I can confirm that Bike Life is Good. And tonight, Bernard is getting his bathers ready, because tomorrow is the last push: we’re heading for the coast.