We begin our bike trip

The horizon is a straight line, the land a mere smudge, and the sky immense. You grow self assured here, I imagine, or feel very inconsequential under a sky this large, a clue perhaps to the Dutch character. It keeps dumping rain on us, then plays gray, then teases us with blue sky. In the afternoons it clears and the wind dies and the sun and stillness last until 10:30pm. We go to bed feeling like we really accomplished something just to have experienced a day like this.

We take the boat out of Amsterdam up to Hoorn, loosely following the coast north. The Ijsselmeer is flecked with sailboats of every vintage fluttering about like moths under a dark sky. Wind turbines stand in the water in vast arrays, dutiful and beautiful. The objections to a wind farm of the coast of Massachusetts are proven ridiculous.
We are aboard the Stijlebank, a cement freighter converted to passenger use, and it will be our home base for a week as we ride a big circle around the Ijsselmeer on our bikes. The basic form of the boat is quite fluid and beautiful, though it is somewhat cluttered by the passenger use: I imagine it was exceedingly handsome as a freighter.

The boat is captained by Albert, and his wife Anina will cook for us. A young Danish guy named Soren is studying to be a sea captain for Maersk in Copenhagen, and is spending the week helping Albert. Bram is our bicycle tour guide. There are 16 of us: all one Dutch and American family.

We begin our bike trip

Amsterdam, Netherlands