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Views of the geese and the sheep in the garden at Onder de Linden, Balgoij

The new kittens at Onder de Linden, Balgoij

Today we salvaged some of my original route plan and travelled along a pretty countryside route from Balgoij to the East, picking up the LF12 route south of Nijmegen. We then travelled to Nijmegen up the LF12 and stopped for lunch and a look around.

Views of the Church at Nijmegen

View of the cafe near the church at Nijmegen

We then reverted to our new mode of navigation and hopped from town to town to reach Arnhem. We reached Arnhem in good time at about 16:30, but unfortunately my route to the B&B on the southern edge of the Hoge Veluwe National Park proved somewhat suboptimal. We arrived at our B&B at about 19:00.

We stopped here for 3 nights as we planned to spend a day visiting the Hoge Veluwe plus a day shopping and sightseeing in and around Arnhem.

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We continued to our next stop at Balgoij near Wijchen, making good time again and arriving at around 18:00

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View leaving Sliedrecht in the morning

Today we continued to follow our new approach to route planning. Unlike our first day we made good time and arrived at the beautiful historic walled town of Heusden at about 15:00. We spend an enjoyable afternoon looking around the town before moving on to nearby Nederhemert North for our B&B stop for the night.

A view along the dyke when entering Woudrichem

The high point of the day was a visit to the historic town of Heusden. This was partly destroyed during World War II. The Dutch Government later spent many millions restoring it, making it a ‘living museum’ – a fully functioning populated town but restored to its previous state. It attracts 300,000 tourists a year, and as we discovered, the Dutch people love to visit on a Sunday afternoon to walk around and spend time in its lovely bars and cafes!

Views of the Windmill and harbour entrance at Heusden

View of the Fish Market, Heusden

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Having taken the overnight ferry from Harwich tp the Hook of Holland, we departed in the morning at about 9:00 to Sliedrecht.

We had prepared detailed plans which involved following the LF1, LF12 and LF4 cycle routes for most of the journey, with short detours from these to each overnight stop. We quickly discovered on the first day that the LF1 and LF12 routes were difficult to follow in places. Much of the route was well signed as we expected, but there were a number of points where there were no signs and we spent a lot of the first day getting lost and trying to re-sync with our route. As the day turned to evening we realised that this approach just would not work, so we decided to ditch our original route plans and adopt an entirely different approach. From this point on, we just drew up a list of towns and villages along what looked like a sensible route, and then navigated from town to town, asking for directions where necessary. This worked much better, as almost everyone we asked naturally knew where their next town was.

Views of the Hook of Holland showing Janina and the tandem

View from a cafe at Maasluis

Views of the Benelux Cycle Tunnel and lift at Barendrecht

This brilliant cycle tunnel crosses the Nieuwe Maas at Barendrecht. It has an escalator for pedestrians and a lift for bikes at each end of the tunnel. The Dutch designed the lift perfectly – our tandem and trailer just fitted in nicely!

Finally we arrived in Sliedrecht at around 21:00, using the GPS on my trusty TyTn II PDA to navigate us to the B&B for the night. I had fortunately programmed all the stops on our journey as waypoints on the GPS as a backup, and this came in very handy on more than one occasion.

Dinner was thankfully provided by the friendly local Turkish restaurant – about the only place open in Sliedrecht that time of night.

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