Breukelen to Amsterdam

It wasn’t so frantic at breakfast this morning and I discovered that smoothies were available at the press of a button.  There was also a station for making some sort of mix or concoction to go on freshly-cooked pancakes, but it was in Dutch so I’m not quite sure if I got that right.  Just because I could, I had a slice of gingerbread with my coffee, but it was quite sweet so I didn’t quite manage to eat it all.

After breakfast we checked the outside temperature before going back upstairs and realised that it was quite cold so we wrapped up warm, although we left our shorts on.  We set off to ride through Breukelen to the first waypoint and came across a huge group of riders, mostly American, probably off one of the river cruises that include bike rides as well.  There was a bit clog up at the waypoint, as a large truck was parked on the side of the road and it was unloading some sort of building material onto a fork lift truck that then proceeded towards the waypoint.  We’re not sure where it went but we got out of there as quickly as we could.  Other than that we had a most enjoyable ride to Amsterdam, despite the cold.  It was very pretty along the Vecht and there were many grand, palatial mansions to admire.  Soon we crossed the river and cycled through lovely countryside until we crossed the Amsterdam-Rijnkanaal.  We cycled through some pretty little villages and decided to stop at one for a hot chocolate to warm us up. As we left it started to rain lightly but we’d expected that and had our rain jackets on.  The rain didn’t last long, but it was still cold.  We found all the waypoints, didn’t get lost and even managed to find our way to the hotel after getting disrupted by road works.  MrMacD did an awesome job of getting us from Breukelen to Amsterdam.  We unpacked the bikes, locked them and left the keys with the hotel reception.  We couldn’t check in as our room wasn’t ready, so we went for a walk to the station and managed to find out what platform our train is likely to leave from in the morning and which entrance to the station we should use.  That done we had a coffee and a light nibble, then walked back towards the hotel to collect the bags we’d left behind when we set off on our cycling adventure.  We also bought sandwiches and muffins for the train journey tomorrow.  The train is at 7am, so it’s an early start and nowhere will be open and we can’t rely on getting anything decent on the train.  Of course, we’ll probably be proved wrong.  We also checked out a restaurant for supper tonight.  We showered and got into some warm clothes and repacked our bags ready for tomorrow’s early start.  We decided to go to dinner at an Italian restaurant just around the corner from the hotel.  It was fairly basic, but warm and friendly.  As we left it felt as if rain was about to start.  All in all a very good day.

The main blip shows our bikes at the start and finish of the journey, a selection of the palatial mansions along the Vecht river, where we had hot chocolate in Abcoude, a tiny car on the cycle track underneath a motorway on the outskirts of Amsterdam and Amsterdam Centraal Station as we headed for our hotel.  The extra is an amazing series of murals that suddenly appeared in front of us as the cycle track took us underneath a motorway.  I just had to take photos of them all.