If I close my eyes, I can actually smell the fragrance that filled the air today for our ride. We cycled through tulip field after tulip field.. and I could not get enough of it. Beautiful. Almost sensory overload.
Partially because we wanted to go with Roolie and partially because we wanted to spare the group of fast bikers my tendency to be, well, not fast… we agreed to go with the slow group. Biking with the Spanish family definitely comes with some challenges. They are slow. Not at pedaling. No, on the path if you are in front of them, they ride your rear tire until they finally make a break for it and burst ahead of you. Not that you want to be ahead anyway. It is far better to follow behind at a safe distance so you can stop or make some other evasive maneuver. The little boy, who is 8 I think, probably is too little to be doing this ride on his own bike. He falls a lot and has trouble starting from a stop. Which they have to do a lot. The oldest girl, who is about 11, rides right with the guide and swerves back and forth, sometimes leaving the path and sometimes having trouble keeping control. The youngest, who is riding the slipstream behind her dad, hangs all over that thing. She leans over to reach into the side back for food, jumps off whenever we stop, turns around to yell. Oh, the yelling. They are the loudest five people! I think some of the tulips covered their little ears as we went by. At one point, though, I was the one yelling. We were crossing a street and we had the right of way and the mom stopped, blocking the path. I hollered at her to go and had to go up on the sidewalk around her. Any illusion that I didn’t dislike them was pretty much shattered then.
We stopped several times in the tulip fields for pictures or for lunch. And for bathroom breaks. Kaitlyn, the child who goes un-natural amounts of time without going, suddenly has us stopping every hour or so to go. It seems she enjoys a more natural approach.
Since we didn’t bike as far as the normal itinerary, (they went in loops just to add kilometers to the day!) we got into Haarlem before the barge did. We wandered around, carefully avoiding sitting at the cafe with the others for drinks, even though Kaitlyn kept saying she wanted to sit with those other kids.
When it came time for the evening stroll, we decided Kaitlyn needed some more wearing out after a late nap. So Bill and I both went on the walk, along with Kaitlyn. Not too far into it, she announced she was thirsty. We said we’d stop if we could find a place with drinks and she happily pointed out the McDonalds. Not too long after that, she ended up back on Bill’s shoulders.
It’s hard to believe there is only one more day of biking. Today I was really sore when we started off. It was as if the day off yesterday made my legs stiffen up. I hope this doesn’t mean that after the plane ride home Sunday I won’t be able to walk!