A lovely long, easy day of tailwind scooting along the LF9’s make-believe seashore, going through a variety-pack of flat Frisian landscapes: heathland, marsh, woods, new towns. It was about as wild and remote as the Netherlands gets… well, ‘wild and remote’ in the same sense that the Yorkshire Pennines can get ‘lush and tropical’.
But anyway, the historic Hanseatic ports were behind me now. On the recommendation of last night’s Vrienden op de Fiets host Bart, who seemed a man of good judgement, I stopped off at Rams Woerte, Steenwijk’s grand Jugendstil manor house and grounds, on my way out of town.
This wasn’t the only grand thing on show: excited toddlers superintended by smiling grandparents were feeding bread to the park deer. It looked proper north-Germanic stuff, not your British Chorleywood pap. Dutch deer evidently eat better quality than my usual breakfast toast.
After a bikepath stretch on the main road north, stopping briefly to filch some free wifi from a petrol station, I followed the LF9’s tranquil, pathy course across the plains of Drenthe and Friesland.
The scenery gradually changed from woodland and farm fields to uncultivated heath, tussocky yellow and gorsey green, splashed by small lakes and standing water.
At a few points I had to squelch my bike on foot round some large and deep puddles blocking my way, accumulated water from the last five months of incessant rain here as it has been in Britain.
This was a discussion point with a walker who stopped to chat as I manoeuvred my way round one. Like everyone in the world, we could blame the bad weather on other places. For me it was all the terrible weather coming in from the Atlantic. For him it was all this terrible weather coming in from Britain.
(He was training for an upcoming hike in Norway. Obviously that’s a bit more mountainous than the Netherlands, so he was doing a lot of work up and down the wooden viewing towers that dot the Frisian landscape. For most visitors Norway is a very expensive affair, but not for a Dutch wildcamper who takes all his food with him in advance. ‘Free’ is one of their favourite words.)
I lunched in Appelscha, a small square modern town, thanks to picnic tables outside the Aldi (I’m as cost-conscious as the Dutch: the first thing they say when I tell them I came with my folding bike on the train is ‘ah, so it goes free!’).
After that there was more very enjoyable ‘wild’, ‘remote’ scenery of heath, wood and marsh, with even some unpaved stretches of LF9 that were nevertheless good fast smooth gravel. The final suburban leg into Groningen was along another fast-cycling F route, the F372.
I stopped to admire the sign (‘Welkom op de Doorfietsroute. Rechtstreeks! Comfortabel! Weinig oponthoud!’ – ‘Welcome to the Throughcycleroute. Direct! Comfortable! Little waiting!’). So did a passing local cyclist – the sign was new and he hadn’t seen it before.
He admired my folding bike, asked sensible questions, and noted its cost-saving potential when travelling on international trains.
And so I got to lively, studenty Groningen, and checked in to my hostel, my home for two nights.
Miles today: 50
Miles since Drielandenpunt: 289