My Experience Bicycle Touring in The Netherlands!

Watch the video first:

This is the first video in a videoseries called ‘Bicycle Touring … | Everything You Need To Know!’ In which I take a country I have personally cycled through and talk about 4 aspects an average bike tourer deals with when cycling through this country: landscape, view on cycling, people and finance.

In this blog post, I want to dive deeper in what my experience was like when I cycled through the Netherlands. Because of the fact that I am Dutch, my experience might differ greatly from yours, but you might find it interesting what cycling was like for me in other parts of the country than where I come from (west coast). If you haven’t already, you can watch the playlist of all the vlogs I made while touring through the Netherlands.

So I started my tour on September 2nd 2017. It was a nice and sunny day and quite warm. Perfect conditions for the start of my bike tour. I started in my home town, which is called Rijnsburg. After saying goodbye at the main square of the village I first made a quick trip back home to replace the front bags, because they were too small (Click here for the video)! Long story short, I left home at 1.30 PM, ready to hit the road! I had not arranged my first night yet (which I would not recommend for the first couple of days of touring) but I knew my country pretty well and had this Nature Campground Pass and a map on my phone with which I could find these cheap campgrounds that were speckled across the country.

The weather was good, the landscape beautiful and of course, Holland is very flat! It’s very easy to cycle here, maybe even too easy! Cycling lanes everywhere and the cars drive very cautious. They are used to cyclists and when they have an accident with a bike, the car driver is often seen as the culprit and the cyclist the victim. Cycling here is not a problem at all! I was still such a newbie and had a lot to learn. I was still using Google Maps all the time, relying on my 4G network! Luckily I had no problems finding places to stay for the night.

I was going from west to east, which is probably the easiest as the wind comes from the west most of the time. The west is also the most crowded part. So as I was cycling east the towns were getting fewer and further between. I crossed the Veluwe, a nice nature area in the middle of the country and there I experienced my first hill as well! My kickstand broke on day 1 already, but luckily in the city of Zwolle, they had a robust replacement for me. Bike shops are pretty much in every town, it’s really amazing.

After 4 days of cycling I finally reached the border with Germany. Holland was still my home ground but now I was stepping into unknown territory. The real adventure was about to begin!