April 29 - Biking Brielle to Leiden, Netherlands

Tuesday
During the night, I could tell that I was getting Verle’s cold. This was very sad news. I could tell that it was hard to climb the stairs and I felt rather weak and lightheaded. Lenie and Cor’s daughter, Yvonne, came her sons, Tom and Max. They were a bit shy and played in the upstairs toy room. Lenie served us a very ample breakfast and we again made sandwiches to picnic.



Lenie gave us a computer map of Leiden to help us find our next stop. We packed up and left shortly after 10. Lenie and Yvonne were doing something together for the day. This was a lovely, warm home, and we like the Friends of Bicyclers program more each day!
We pedaled toward the Brielle Centrum, briefly lost our way, and after asking for help, we pedaled through the countryside on a bike trail toward Delft and Leiden. It was a beautiful morning and we really enjoyed the ride. One of the most beautiful sights is the Japanese cherry blossoms. Unlike ours, they are lavendar/pink and large. They are beginning to fall, and the ground is covered with beautiful blossoms. It’s no wonder that the Japanese people like the cherry blossoms so much. I wonder if these cherry trees would grow in Nebraska???



I felt better as we rode along. We crossed the bridge connecting the third island containing Brielle, and took the ferry across the bay below Rotterdam. We saw big ships and a lot of maritime activity.



We may have missed one of the white arrow signs with red letters (that show the bike paths which are the shortest connection between towns.) Thinking we should go to the Centrum, we followed the signs there. Once there, we didn’t know how to get out to resume our journey to Leiden. A man with a map hooked to the handlebars of his bike helped us figure out the general direction toward Pinijaak, and we picked up the red on white arrows for the town in just a few blocks. Unfortunately, it started to rain fairly hard. I put a garbage bag over my backpack (I had set one out for Verle, but he didn’t get his along), and we put on our raincoats. It was chilly and unpleasant. We stopped under a highway bridge to eat the sandwiches and banana that we had brought from Lenie and Cor’s. We rode on in the rain, but I was getting quite cold, shaky, and weak. It became very hard for me to navigate in the traffic. In going around a round-about, I caught the curb with my tire and the weight of my backpack caused me to fall over onto my knee and hands. I got a bloody knee and my knee felt like it might be hurt inside. A lady stopped to help us and told us about a train that takes bikes that goes to The Hague and then to Leiden. She said it was about 24 miles yet to Leiden. We rode on, but since it was already 3:30, we decided that the train was our best option. We had to take our bikes down an elevator to the platform below. There was not a ticket office. A young couple helped Verle purchase tickets from a machine for us and our bikes to The Hague. Verle couldn’t have gotten the tickets without them.
I was cold and shaky by the time we arrived at the Hague. I stayed with the bikes while Verle purchased our tickets to Leiden and a phone card to call our host in Leiden. The tickets for the bikes cost more than the tickets for us to ride the train! We had time before our train, but the only place we could eat and sit down was at a Burger King. How we hated to eat American food when we could have been enjoying Dutch treats. We couldn’t find the outside phone booths where we were supposed to use the phone cards and it was still cold and rainy, so we just got on the train shortly before six. (We’d had to wait until then, because they won’t allow bikes on the trains between 4 and 6.)
We arrived at the Leiden train station, and after asking for help a few times, we found the police station and our host’s home around the corner from it. Her name is Gerda. She helped us park our bikes in a downstairs storage area and served us coffee and snacks. Gerda likes pop music and asked about a Nebraska singer, Bruce Springsteen and a song she thinks he wrote and sang about Nebraska. Gerda made MANY phone calls to find us a place to stay tomorrow.



Since it is a holiday, much of the country had vacation from Wednesday through the weekends, and homes just didn’t seem to available. She fortunately found us a place at last. I took a warm bath to warm up and went right to bed without writing my journal. My cold and my throat are pretty bad. We slept very well in our small bedroom.