In the Netherlands, each junction of the cycling paths that web the provinces of North and South Holland, has a number. On a sunny April morning, cycling south from the city of Haarlem to the tulip fields that patchwork the countryside in swaths of fuchsia, yellow and cardinal red, I set out via way points 23 and 90.And yet, even with the backup of a GPS app, within two signposts I took a wrong turn, my cycling companions took a different wrong turn and it would be hours before we reunited.“We give you maps and directions, you have the GPS and you have a brain,” said Ben Eijkelhof, a guide with Boat Bike Tours on the eight-day cycling trip primarily in South Holland. “That is the most important thing.”
A windmill in Kinderdijk, a UNESCO World Heritage site of 19 preserved 18th-century windmills that was on the author’s itinerary from Rotterdam. (Photo: The New York Times/Melissa Schriek)
A Dutch company, Boat Bike Tours staged the trip from a river ship, a floating base camp that cyclists left each morning, carrying a sack lunch packed from the breakfast buffet, and returned to each afternoon for dinner and overnights.Self-guided cycling trips are among the company’s most affordable (from €799, about US$927 or S$1,186)) and least structured, offering opportunities to detour for those, like me, interested in navigating.The route “is a great puzzle,” promised Lenneke Mommersteeg, another of the two guides overseeing the trip, during a day-one orientation. “In one week, you are going to see everything on a postcard of the Netherlands: the tulips, the cheese, the windmills.”Even more, it turns out, if you take a wrong turn.SHIPBOARD STAGING
