De Achterhoek

The Achterhoek. The "Back Corner". Of the Netherlands, that is.

Aaaahhh. Everything came together for this ride. I got the weather right (pedaled in the right direction, which is always downwind or away from weather), the bike was (finally) cranking smoothly, the trains ran on time, the trip chosen was just the right length: Zevenaar and around Winterswijk to Enschede. The Achterhoek.

The door to the commuter diesel train out of Arnhem had only two doors--and one not working. Since the aisleway was too narrow for bicycles, all 8-9 bicycles on this nice holiday morning piled up in the working doorway, making for interesting entrances and exits along the way. But at each stop, we just figured out how to make it work--everyone was laughing at the hundreds of little inconveniences, everyone got his shin clobbered at some point, but we all got where we were going without the conductor needing to be involved. We just worked it out as we went. No one knew I was American, and no one knew what I was thinking: in the US, this would have gotten all tense, to the brink of fistfights.

Every time a bicycle was hauled off the train, the seated passengers and the ones standing in the aisleway applauded, and the cyclist, far from taking it as "good riddance" waved his hand over his head as though he were Lance Armstrong. Soon it was my turn, everyone applauded to see another bike off the train, and I was alone in Zevenaar. Turn south to the river Rijn, then east into deepest Achterhoek, along the German border.

Early in the ride, the border slices to make a little peninsula into the Netherlands. I guess they were attached to these villages of Elten and Hoge Elten (pictured). Or...maybe Germany just wanted to make themselves a nuisance to Dutch cyclists. This was one difficult hill to get over.
 

The next three hours were a pearl necklace of very small Dutch villages, interesting in their differences:

• Stokkum: bicycle traffic jam! Not much in the village itself, but attractive forests to the west and towns to the east, and only Camphuisenweg to connect them.
• 's-Heerenberg:The brick walks through downtown covered with tables and people jammed together drinking coffee, eating pannekoeken (an excellent Dutch style of pancakes).
• Netterden:Now this tiny, apparently wealthy farming village required a sharp right turn where the border turned south and continued east, a retro-back corner of this back corner. Achterhoek of the Achterhoek. And every bit as remote from the rest of the Netherlands as that sounds.
• Dinxperlo:Now, who doesn't love a town with a name like Dinxperlo? There was some kind of open-air rock festival going on. I couldn't squeeze myself and my bicycle anywhere near it--I could only try not to block the fairgoers squeezing past each other and past the street vendors.

And then there were no villages. I continued east along the Achterhoek's south border, and at about Driehonderdmeterweg (three hundred meter way), farmland largely gave way to forest.
 

Some forests were less inviting walking about than others. I didn't care to test the bike tires off-trail either, certainly not this far from train stations.
 

Soon the bicycle path signs pointed left to Winterswijk, in the center of the Dutch protuberance into Germany. As I followed the border from eastbound to northbound to northwestbound, the Winterswijk arrows continued to point left at 6 or 7 kilometers. But now it was time to decide. Angle back to Winterswijk station for a ride home, or continue north and then east to Enschede. I was tired, Winterswijk was close. Enschede, though, would complete the last link on this entire end of the German border--I wouldn't leave a gap the way I had between Harlingen and Stavoren, way north on the Frisian coast. I sat. I drank water, I calculated that pressing on to Enschede would make for a 140-kilometer day.

I pressed north. At work tomorrow, my legs would have all day to throb at their leisure.

I admit that after 120 kilometers, all the farmlands and back roads and canals were beginning to blur together. But then at Rekken, I rounded the north corner of the Back Corner, passed north and then east into the Twente, up Broekdijk and Munsterdijk, and backtracked to catch the Witte Veenweg into the Witte Veen nature monument. Spectacular, and shockingly reminiscent of the Florida Gulf Coast around, say, Crystal River.
 

A wonderful finish to the ride. Indeed a finish, as I passed immediately into Enschede, wound my way to the station, packed my bicycle into the train before the schedule sign had flipped to the destination (I had boarded the same train at the end of my Twente ride, just four days ago). I'm not sure what the NS conductors think of our boarding trains before the destination is posted, but no one has said anything yet.

The ride home was peaceful, and my legs didn't tighten up or cause me the agony I expected. Let's hear it for muscle conditioning. Ja, nog niet te oud. This was my longest ride yet--145 kilometers (90 miles). As we rolled into Amersfoort station for the last connection, near sundown, several balloons were looking for a place to rest.
 

So was I.