Drunk Dutchmen

Yesterday Kat and I rode to the sea.  It's totally freaking flat here!  And after hauling ass and our stuff all over the place, it was like riding on a rainbow.

View Trip to the Sea in a larger map
One of the various differences between Kat and myself is the immense pleasure she gets out of seeing any barnyard animal, whereas the most I can muster up is, "Oh, well, that's adorable..."  We happened to take the 'Cow Path' route to the sea, passing by acres of goats, sheep, miniature horses, and of course, cows.  It was as if we had reached the end of the rainbow and it was a land full of cuddly animals instead of pots of gold.  "Awwww, Rachel, look at the cute little goat!  Just look at 'im!  I love his big ole ears!  Awwww!"

We passed a field of horses with one white guy sprawled out away from the other horses.  Neither of us grew up near a farm and weren't sure if he was sleeping or just dead.  It was like the one guppy in the tank at Walmart who is near the filter and for the first couple seconds you can't tell if it's swimming in circles, or it's dead little body is just getting tossed about by the flow of water.  It didn't look promising.  I was riding along looking at it and it started to get up.  He was alive! What I saw was this...

What Kat saw was this...

Understandably, we were both captivated.  Kat stopped riding in her tracks while I just stared, kept riding and crashed right into her.  The funny thing when one is crashing into another body of matter is that one forgets all motor functions.  I completely blanked on the fact that I should break.  Breaks?!  I couldn't even locate them on my handlebars.  I hit her and swerved into the reeds growing on the side of the road which masked the algae-infested moat that bordered each plot of farmland.  All for The Last Unicorn.  

Luckily it was sunny and I dried out pretty quickly.

Despite being a mountain raised girl, I get especially excited about seeing the ocean.  When my mom and I went to the coast of Portugal last year, and we went down to the beach, I kept yelling, "Mom!  We're on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean!  How cool is that?!"  Hahaha, this was right before a big wave crashed over the rock I was standing on and got submerged in that Atlantic Ocean up to my knees.

I had a similar feeling when Kat and I finally reached the North Sea.  It was the ocean!  How fabulous!!!  There was a wide fine-sanded beach with double rows of 'summer homes' right within spitting distance from the water!  

On the way home we went back through Haarlem, to hit up the super cute ice cream shop for a second time since the employees had undergone a shift change and we could slip in undetected for another helping.  Haarlem is the under-rated sister of Amsterdam, complete with canals, and terribly charming but without all of us tourists.  While riding around trying to find the ice cream shop, we had to pull over to make way for an ambulance and stopped alongside a makeshift table with several empty bottles of champagne.  At that moment a well dressed Dutchman with a camera slung across his camera came out of the town house and started speaking to us.  He told us that the city wanted to build a three story underground parking garage right where we were standing.  However, they had just defeated the proposal, and because he was a lawyer on the case, he held a celebration in front of his house which was to explain away all the empty bottles.  

Kat and I eyed each other to escape as he recounted this random story and kept readjusting his belt.  We're used to people never talking to us unless they work at an information desk, so we were a little skeptical about our verbosely drunken Dutchman and his faulty belt.  Not talking to strangers is just the Northern European way of life.  He stopped his legal story, looked directly at Kat and said, "What is a nice American girl like yourself doing on a shit bike like that?"

She was standing over her bike, the chain drooping miserably.  After the hours spent fixing and refixing her bike, we both just had to laugh.  "Just one minute.  We'll fix it."  For the next hour he pulled and prodded the derailleur, running inside to grab several different tools, all the while we got to meet his wife and two sons as they slowly returned home.  His oldest daughter had just graduated from high school and to his amazement had been partying straight for the last week and had yet to come home.  None of the family whom we met seemed at all phased that their dad had just befriended to young American girls.  Amazingly he actually fixed her bike.  It was a slightly bent metal bit that wasn't allowing her chain to 'glide' through the derailleur.  It simply was not 'gliding' properly.  

We had to celebrate.  He brought out another bottle of wine and a parting gift.  He had recently finished recording an album and gave us each two, one for us and one to bestow upon someone back home.  So, be aware, we might be giving one of you a Dutch album with a recording of Wichita Lineman very soon.  

Kat's bike now rides like a cloud, we have cd's of Dutchmen singing country tunes, and have had more than our share of ice cream cones after our trip to the North Sea.