London to Amsterdam By Bike

A few years ago, when my wife and children went back to America for a summer visit, I cooked up a weekend excursion to ride my bicycle from London to Amsterdam. The discount airline, easyJet, had recently come to Switzerland, and I noticed in the schedule that it served London Luton on Friday afternoons and came back to Geneva from Amsterdam late on Sunday night. In the meantime I calculated I could ride from Cambridge to Harwich, cross the North Sea on a ferry, and then head to Amsterdam from the Hook of Holland. In all ride would be about 200 kilometers (120 miles), and I had expectations that it would relieve my ignorance about the Netherlands. I had been to Amsterdam a few times on business, but all I knew from those day trips were airports taxis and corporate meals. I had never seen a canal nor tiptoed through the tulips.

When you live alone in the summer, friends check in warily, as if perhaps you are loitering nearer the secretarial rather than the neighborhood pool. On the day I was leaving good friends invited me to lunch, suspecting (correctly) that I was on my seventh consecutive day of pasta and those mixed salads that come shrink-wrapped in plastic. When I outlined my weekend plans and started quizzing them on English roads, they could not understand such eccentricity, telling me that Bury St. Edmonds was dreary and that Harwich had been going downhill since the Mayflower set sail. I tried to justify my mad-dog-and-Englishman approach by saying the venture was conceived because easyJet had come to Geneva. “Ah,” one of them said, “blame it on Stelios.”

I can’t blame Stelios, the easyJet founder, for wanting to ride in the summer midday sun. But I can lay guilt trip in his direction for the four-hour delay on my first flight from Geneva to London. Generally I would not have minded the delay, except that I was dressed in my bike clothes—space-age Lycra emblazoned with newspaper logos—and in the interest of saving weight I was traveling without a book. Having come of reading age in and around New York City, I usually carry a book everywhere, thinking of life as a subway delay. When the underground travel gods announce, “We’ve got holding signals up ahead,” I pass the time reading. But now I had to get by on departure-lounge freebie publications, those with names like “Jetway” or perhaps “Tarmac” (‘the magazine of mechanical difficulties’).

As a result of the delay, it was too late to ride from Luton Airport to Cambridge and still make a pre-arranged dinner. Hence the great bike weekend began inside a black London taxi. Fortunately, my bike of choice is a drop-handled racer, with narrow Italian tires and those ski-binding pedals. With the wheels removed, it fit into the taxi, and he dropped me in Cambridge outside a Chinese restaurant that, because of the fish tanks in the window, looked like the Great Barrier Reef.

I have a special affection for Cambridge. In 1974, I spent a semester studying cold war economics and politics at the London School of Economics (mostly what I learned about university life in England is that I don’t like sherry but that professors do). During the term I spent a few days in Cambridge, where my uncle had friends who worked for the University Press. They welcomed me into their weekend lives of walking the Roman roads and climbing church towers. Their warm company (and hot-water bottles) was more than enough to ward off the misty chills of an English November, although I was never colder in my life than on a Sunday afternoon while visiting Ely Cathedral.

Those Cambridge friends were now awaiting me in the Chinese restaurant, which launched a cultural revolt of sorts when I demanded to be seated near my bike. What I especially remembered about Cambridge was that bikes get stolen with the insouciance that beer gets consumed. (Locals blame it on socialism, if not Kim Philby.) Because I was traveling without a Kryptonite lock, I wanted to keep an eye on my wheels. In response, the restaurant owner and then his wife kept up a monologue about “health regulations.” But the choice for them was either to take in the bike or lose a party of five. Diplomatically or financially, he finally allowed me to store it near the kitchen.

For whatever reasons (perhaps ‘revenge is a dish best served with dumplings’) a lot of the sauce on my food tasted like chain lubricant. But I had great pleasure seeing my Cambridge friends. After dinner I loved riding around various colleges. Oxford campuses are hidden behind medieval walls. By contrast, Cambridge is open and looks like the setting for an elegant lawn party. In the half-light of dusk at 11 PM, I weaved along the cobblestone streets and meandered along the Cambs River, even at that hour alive with long boats and undergraduates, both of which looked tipsy.

My plan for the next morning, Saturday, was to buy a first-day copy of the new Harry Potter and to mail it to my expectant family in America. Then I would head for the coast, about 80 miles to the southwest, and catch the night boat to Holland. A funny thing happened, however, on the way to the North Sea: I started lingering in Cambridge bookstores. For years I have ended long trips at a London airport, and then spent a jet-lag recovery day buying books in Cambridge. One of my travel frustrations is that in places like India or Pakistan, I can never find books about local politics and history. En route I make do with banal guides until I get to England, waylay a sales clerk in Cambridge, and get shown a shelf of books about places like Amritsar or Peshawar. On this occasion I found a topographical map of Suffolk, the county through which I would be riding, and other books that I “had to have.” It meant another trip to the post office, all of which cost me precious riding time.

I had calculated it would take me six hours to ride to the Harwich ferry terminal, and my ferry left at 8 PM. Thus I wanted to leave Cambridge no later than noon, to give myself time for breaks and flat tires. But after the bookstores, I met my friends for coffee, which turned into a pub lunch. I ordered something like “toad in the hole” and about an hour later the waitress showed up, apologizing profusely for having run out of toad. Plus the pub we had chosen, hoping for fast service, looked like a pinball machine. Will there always be an England if the pubs look like video arcades?

By the time I bolted, I was seriously behind schedule. To make matters worse, I took the wrong road out of Cambridge. After three or four map checks, I figured I wasn’t on the road to Sunbury but on another heading to Newmarket, which filled me with dread for two reasons: I might now miss my ferry, and the name of the town suggested a novel by Charles Dickens, perhaps one of those, like Hard Times, that I never finished reading for homework in the eight grade.

By mid-afternoon, I was laboring along busy roads outside Bury St. Edmunds, annoyed at both the traffic and now the cold drizzle. Wasn’t this a July weekend? Why did it feel like, well, England? I veered south toward Lavenham, in the company of some large trucks, feeling skeptical about the entire undertaking. Yes, blame it on Stelios. But little by little the road narrowed and the truck traffic faded away. It may be a tourist Mecca, but I loved Lavenham, where the main street has pink Tudor houses, giving it a touch of Bermuda on the edge of a Turner painting. It prompted me to stop for tea and to admire England’s love of public benches.

The rest of the afternoon was a race against the clock. When I got to Hadleigh, I still had more than twenty miles to go, and less than two hours to make the boat. Riders in the Tour de France average 24 M.P.H. even over mountains but I cruise around 17 M.P.H., at least on open roads when I know where I am going. Here, while the landscape was flat and partitioned into ancient fields, I had to stop often at crossroads and make decisions about whether I wanted to ride toward places like Stoke-by-Nayland (I didn’t) or Manningtree (I did). The last ten miles hugged the coast of the River Strour; as I got closer to Harwich it would occasionally vanish behind great mountains of shipping containers.

Not knowing where I was going (even though there were endless signs that said “Ferry”), I scrambled onto a local train for the final run into Harwich, remembering that the railroad connected directly with the boat terminal. I was among the last passengers to line up for my ticket and then the agent said I would have to board the bike as if it were a car, which meant I had to follow a zigzag course around the shipyard, guided by men wearing reflective jackets and waving batons. It reminded me of a school obstacle course. About ten minutes after walking the bike up the ship’s stern ramp, I felt the engines slipping into gear, and we were off to the Hook of Holland.

Originally I had hoped to take a night boat on which I could sleep in a cabin. But none were in service that evening. Instead I was on a high-speed ferry, an enormous catamaran with trucks and cars in the hold, and bars and restaurants on the glitzy passenger deck. During my London semester in 1974, whenever I crossed the Channel, the boats felt like they were escaping Dunkirk. They would pitch and roll, and by morning, the decks would be coated with salt, if not slanting rain. But the new ferries are floating Las Vegas hotels. You feel nothing from the waves. There are swank restaurants everywhere. Croupiers, mostly bored young girls from Eastern Europe, stand expressionless behind their velvet tables—making gambling feel like shopping in Bulgaria. Truck drivers swarm around the bars, drinking and watching television. I felt like I was lost at sea in a mall.

Cutting the waves at almost thirty knots, the ferry reached the Hook of Holland shortly after midnight. In disbelief that this chilly month was still July, I biked into the brisk, refinery air to search for the Hotel America, which I had reserved on the Internet. After a few turns, I found it tucked into a dreary strip of stores and restaurants. Who really wants to stay in the Hook of Holland anyway? To check in all I had to do was take the key from a waiter. As in the Cambridge restaurant, he didn’t want me taking my bike upstairs. Not that it was against the rules to room with a bicycle, but the waiter tried to tell me it was a stupid idea. I persisted, pleading that I had no lock. But I figured out what he was trying to explain when I got to the second floor and the staircase, as in many Dutch houses, turned almost into a ladder. Only by taking the bike apart did I manage to climb to my tree-house room, which I entered humming lyrics from the Eagles: “Welcome to the Hotel California.”

Now, at 1 AM on Sunday morning, I was more than halfway to Amsterdam, and the next day I looked forward to riding along the country’s fabled network of cycle paths, which everyone said would steer me from any corner into downtown Amsterdam. For that reason I didn’t even have a detailed road map. I slept well, needless to say, but what I didn’t figure on was the driving rain that sliced against the windowpanes at 7 AM. After a breakfast of mousetrap cheese and stale crackers, I was soaked to the bone shortly just as I left the hotel (“You can check out any time you like/But you can never leave.”)

Leaving the Hook, I followed a path that ran along coastal sand dunes. From what could see through my fogged-up bike glasses, I guessed that the Netherlands is probably lovely, at least in summer. But I wondered if I was too early or too late in the season to have enjoyed it. At least when you ride in the rain, you stay warm. But I wanted to stop in The Hague, where friends were living, and that was my undoing. First, I confused the unpronounceable Scheveningen for The Hague. The first is a tawdry seaside resort; the latter is a royal capital. But I missed the turn for the palace and aimlessly circled the two cities, which are among the few in Europe without a central square or legible maps in bus kiosks. By the time I found my friends’ house, I could feel the water in my shoes sloshing around my toes.

Coffee helped to restore me, but I didn’t dare peel off my rain jacket, both to spare their parquet kitchen floor and because I thought it might prompt me to end the venture then and there. I made brief wharf-rat conversation, and then, claiming the need to stay warm, vanished into the vaporous midst. My next destination was Leiden, site of the medieval university. Since childhood, I had heard about the University of Leiden from Dutch friends who visited us when my sisters and I were small. Now I tried to find it in the rain. I bounced along some cobblestone streets, but somehow I think I missed the university. Either that, or the Dutch college blends into Leiden’s canal houses.

An Amsterdam friend is a bike enthusiast, and we had arranged to meet at the Leiden train station. His wife would collect my sodden backpack, and together he and I would ride the last thirty miles into the city. In theory, when planning the long weekend, it sounded perfect to go Dutch into Amsterdam. But by the time we hooked up, it was 11 AM, I was beyond cold, and he had what bike racers call “fresh legs.”

Right from the station, he was breaking away, and I was holding on for dear life. (The bike term for this clinging desperation is “wheel-sucking.”) Not only was he rested, fed and dry, he was also a good rider. We flew alongside canals, over small bridges, up the River Amstel, and past windmills until, to use another bike expression, I “bonked” or “blew up.” That’s when you can’t turn the pedals, when you can’t walk the bike, when all you want to do is pitch the machine into a canal and lie down in a field. Fortunately, I blew up near an attractive restaurant. We ate sandwiches at the bar because the headwaiter thought it best if we didn’t sit on their upholstered chairs.

After lunch, when we finally glimpsed some Amsterdam canals, I felt I would make it. It had stopped raining. We made a little detour so I could see the heart of the city, including the red-light district. At least some of that window-shopping warmed me up. The trip ended at my friends’ house around 5 PM when I was shown to the guest bathroom. There I made the decision to enter the shower fully clothed. For thirty minutes, I peeled off one layer after another until the bottom of the shower was covered with roadside grit from places likes Cockfield, Monster, and Amstelveen. Returning to life under the torrent of hot water I could finally stop blaming it all on Stelios. Or as the Eagles liked to remind us, in those pitched-seventies voices: “They’re livin’ it up at the Hotel California.”