C2A: Amsterdam, finally

Sam isn't feeling well in the morning so we ride together down to the Gouda station and I see her onto a train that will take her into Amsterdam. There are some disruptions due to someone stealing cable on the train lines, so it takes her longer than the expected 15 minutes.

I turn around and head north out of the city. There's a stiff crosswind blowing out over the Reeuwijk ponds, the result of peat overharvesting. These days it's amply serviced by the leisure watercraft industry. I cross the Old Rhine, (Oude Rijn), much diminished, in Bodegraven, then push on through the fields and canals to Nieuwkoop. I pass a lock: a first; I thought all the water was basically at the same level around here.

Big houses line the road in Nieuwkoop, with a little canal between the road and the front garden. There are little rowboats moored up between the lilypads, with water easements leading out onto the lakes behind the houses. I wonder how far one could travel by water alone. Probably pretty far, although I guess rights of way could get tricky.

I skirt Zevenhoven and then enter the sprawling industrial parks east of Schipol. A couple of airplanes take off and bank over my head; I try to get video but keep turning up like 5 seconds too late. I take a bridge over a highway and feel like I can see the entire country laid out before me. Man it's flat in the Netherlands.

Soon I'm riding through Amstelveen, which I suppose must be where all the rich people in Amsterdam live, judging by the number of Mercedes and Audis I see in the gravel drives abutting the enormous houses lining the road here. Then I arrive at the Amsterdamse Bos country park, but the cyclepath is closed so I follow a woman on a cargo bike up the main street towards the Amsterdam ring road. She easily outpaces me. I tell myself it's because she has a battery and I'm carrying two tents.

On the other side of the ring road I join a gaggle of cyclists heading up into town, but I peel off towards the museum and the tourist quarter with a painter on a bike. All of his kit is in a little tray attached to the back of his bakfiets; his brushes are in a case he wears on his back. I think it's just terrific, even if he's way faster than I am. He nearly obliterates a little tourist boy who wanders into the bike path. His grandmother pulls the boy back; the painter doesn't react at all: no swerve, no flinch, no look. Just keeps on riding. I eat his dust as we ride through the museum itself.

On the far side, I cross a bridge and suddenly I'm in the thick of it. There are people everywhere: Portugese women walking in groups, German families with maps, Americans on orange rental bicycles pulling out into traffic without looking. I have to make an emergency stop in front of a lady who pulls crosswise into the cyclepath; I hear her boyfriend say, "I always tell you to look both ways," in a tone that indicates he's an insufferable person to spend time with. I follow the lines that the locals take and sneer at a group of men in tight trousers, all of whom have their phone out, debating loudly which way it is to the sex museum. I feel a totally unearned sense of superiority, high up on my tourist bike.

Sam calls and tells me that due to the cable theft problem, she's been held up at the previous station. I ride under the central station, which smells powerfully of urine, and along the quayside, down to where Sam's waiting for me. I find her sitting on a wall with her head in her hands.

We're both mighty hungry so we head across the street for some food and a last Nice Beer before making our way out to the ferry by train. It's a short ride on the train from Amsterdam to Driehuis, and the train's empty; and then it's a short ride from Driehuis out to IJmuiden, where the ferry is waiting. We collect our ticket and take our bikes up onto the boat and leash them to the bulkhead. There are six or seven other bicycles on the boat with us: tourists heading up to Scotland maybe.

We head up a deck or two and find our cabin and then I immediately fall asleep.