I finished the Dutch End to End today by riding the short last leg up to Noordkaap: the lonely, windy, northernmost point of the mainland, with little but electricity pylons, wind turbines and the odd oystercatcher for company.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/EE-Neths-8a.jpg)
Another F route took me fast and car-free right from my hostel in the centre of Groningen to the town of Bedum, an appropriate name as it only took a few heartbeats to get there. After that I could use, for the first and only time on this trip, the Netherlands’ code-number system of negotiating its general national cycle network.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/EE-Neths-8b-1589x1200.jpg)
The idea is that each junction in an area (knooppunt, ‘node point’) has a two-letter number. And every junction signposts each neighbouring junction. So, simply by following a series of numbers, you can get by bike from anywhere to anywhere: the mathematician’s dream of turning complex debatable information into unambiguous strings of digits. Mathematicians have strange dreams. I know.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/EE-Neths-8c.jpg)
Anyway, that means that Bedum to Noordkaap, for instance, is encoded neatly as 7-39-37-18-52-78-67-65-74-70-77-69. For non-mathematicians – normal people, in other words – there are prominent signs displaying useful maps at each junction.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/EE-Neths-8e.jpg)
There were a couple of small towns en route to Noordkaap, and Uithuizen, a less small one. Several of them featured handsome early-1900s buildings among the newer square brick boxes that – not unpleasantly, just a bit unimaginatively – characterise much of the Netherlands outside historic cities and villages.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/EE-Neths-8d.jpg)
One welcome thing about the rural Neths: you’re never far from a rubbish bin, whether those test-your-aim blikvangers I talked about the other day, or conventional post-mounted ones, some of them miles from anywhere along a bike path. Clearly, in a land where a lot of mail is delivered by pedal power, even some bin lorries are bicycles here.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/EE-Neths-8f.jpg)
After Uithuizen it was a windy slog along long flat lanes, through a couple of notches in dykes clearly there to hold back massive tidal surges, to the coast itself. The real coast, not the imaginary one of the LF9 back inland.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/EE-Neths-8g.jpg)
It’s austere stuff, with long green banks – dotted with the discarded shells of seabird lunches – fending off the North Sea. I rode along the water side of the bank for a while, on the sloped tarmac that goes down to the shore. Even that, not meant to be a road at all, was smooth and unpotholed.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/EE-Neths-8j.jpg)
The tide was out and an island suggested itself on the grey misty horizon. I headed alongside the coast for a few kilometres east until I got to the monument marking the northernmost point: a simple three-pillared affair commemorating three WWII pilots killed here in 1940.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/EE-Neths-8h.jpg)
I suppose I could have bought a bottle of champagne or something from Albert Heijn back in Uithuizen, but it was too cold and windy anyway for much of a celebration of my trip’s completion, so I took a few snaps, watched the forest of wind turbines wheel round industriously and the factory chimneys over at Eemshaven hurl smoke into the breeze, saw a lone road cyclist whoosh past with the tailwind, and gazed out over the chilly monochrome horizon.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/EE-Neths-8k.jpg)
For a while I was the furthest north person on Dutch soil. Well, sand. Well, apart from that island up there, whatever it is.
I headed back to Uithuizen and got the train back to Groningen. Another very enjoyable End to End bagged.
Conclusion
The Netherlands isn’t scenically the most exciting big-ride you can do. But you don’t come here for the scenery, just as you don’t go to Iran for the pubs. There’s plenty to see and enjoy – the Golden-Age buildings in the historic towns and villages, the remarkable water-based economic history, the way the Dutch have (often literally, in the case of the polders) created their own very modern country with few resources beyond hard-nosed hard work. The people are practical, down-to-earth and generally friendly, humorous and helpful.
It’s not a cheap country but it’s easy to get food, drink and accommodation at sensible-bargain European prices (and I do recommend Vrienden op de Fiets by the way, but be prepared for a lot of emailing to find someone with availability). I was generally paying €30 or so for a hostel, a bit less for VodF, a bit more for a cheap hotel, and I mostly ate out of supermarkets.
But the main attraction of the Netherlands is, of course, the cycling. In traversing the entire country from south to north I hardly encountered motor vehicles at all; perhaps 95% of my route was offroad.
And not just ‘offroad’ in the British sense, of mud and piecemeal chaos, but smooth, wide, pothole-free, direct ‘bicycle roads’ often with priority at junctions. You can just enjoy the business of getting from A to B, and all the way to Z, on a bike, in a stress-free way like nowhere else in the world. I’ve had a great trip, and I’ll be back to cycle again here soon.
Miles today: 33
Miles since Drielandenpunt: 322
Miles Drielandenpunt to Noorkaap: 316