Twelve photos

From a week biking around Holland / Issue 1,143

Oh, hi friends!

You get a map, and the map shows you the entire route. 

An almost complete circle. Here to there to there to there to there. A beginning, an end.

This is how our "cyclemoon" (trademark forthcoming) began.

Here's a map of Holland, and here's where you're going to bike every day.

So Colin and I got fitted on our bikes and rode 25 miles each day from town to town.

There's a GPS, too, of course. But paper maps are a good back-up. A Canadian couple we met on a ferry said they went 10 kilometers out of the way because they lost their signal. 

Holland has A+++ bike paths.

Lesson: It's easier to move forward when you have a clear path.

A clear map.

And a clear destination.

We biked from Uithoorn to Leiden, Leiden to The Hague, The Hague to Dordrecht, Dordrecht to Schoonhoven, Schoonhoven to Utrecht, and Utrecht to a small town outside of Amsterdam.

There were tulips.

And the windmills of Kinderdijk.

Here’s us, at the windmills of Kinderdijk.

Turns out spring is baby season. We passed by baby cows, baby goats, baby sheep.

There was also a donkey. An adult. I think.

Colin befriended the donkey.

And many cats.

Many, many cats.

This one lives in a pub in Utrecht.

There's a once-in-a-lifetime Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam right now. His most famous painting was no longer at the show, but luckily The Hague was on our bike route, so we saw it — her — there, too.

The days go like this: breakfast, bike, lunch, bike, dinner, sleep. 

(Just to clarify, we cycle each day to a new hotel. We are not camping out or anything!!!)

It's wonderful.

I take photos to remember moments I don't want to forget.

I forget to post photos because I'm living in the moments I don't want to forget.

Six days and 150 miles later, in a small city outside of Amsterdam, we gave back our bikes, hopped on a train, ate Indonesian food in the heart of the city, and flew back to New York the next day. 

Why do we travel? To see something new.

Why do we travel? To eventually come home to ourselves.

PS — New Do It Today podcast with my friend and professional organizer Julie Bestry dropped this morning. More about it tomorrow, but let’s just say our convo was the jolt I needed on this/every Monday! Listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.