18 June 2014 (morning drizzle, afternoon cloudy) 26km

I had decided that after waking Julia up at 5.30am the last couple of mornings, to do so again was taking too big a risk to my welfare, so today she slept until 7am. I however, remained awake thanks to the constant caw cawing and coo cooing of the bloody crows and pigeons.  Now…..a joke’s a joke.  When we first got to the UK the little squirrels and the variety of birdlife with deer bounding through the forest, was all picture postcard and straight out of a fairytale.  Now however, four weeks into the trip, at 4.30am when the sun comes up, I feel like opening up with an AK 47 and doing a Rambo on all the local birdlife, which seem to think I’ve put in an alarm call request.   Had a cup of tea and over to the showers and after rating these as very good and feeling normal again, it was back to the tent for breakfast.  Tilly stuck her head in the door with an overall map of Holland, a nice message written on it and some points of interest, before they headed off up the drive.  Soon after, the drizzle began.   Donning our rain jackets, we strolled to reception up yet another tree lined driveway, to see if the internet was working, but no luck.  Paid for the night and also bought tokens to do some washing and use the dryer and as the drizzle continued, we edited photos on the tablet and hoped the skies would clear.

Breda with World Cup Fever 

By lunchtime, the rain had stopped and the clouds were a lighter shade of grey.  We broke camp and headed in a northwest direction with our freshly laundered clothes.  Because of the hold up with the computer yesterday, and the slow start today, we have decided to head to Amsterdam first so we can catch up with our friend Michele.  She is an American girl who we first met thirty years ago on a trip across the States and she has since been out to visit us with her eldest son.  She has been living in India for a year and is now travelling with her youngest son, Jakobi and husband Curtis, both of whom we have never met before but are looking forward to meeting.  Left the camp at 1pm on beautiful secluded bike paths, looking for the centre of town in Oosterhout.  Luckily this was easy to find and we found the Info Office no problem as well.  Julia got cracking with our computer on their free wifi while I used their computer to map our course to our next destination.  As Julia continued to try and get the info required from Microsoft to install Office on our computer, I went to the Jumbo supermarket where I purchased the next day’s supplies.  To get there, I had to go through an amazing shopping mall.  Now for someone who doesn’t shop at all, the cleanliness and variety of shops was outstanding.  For such a small town, I can only think that it serves the Breda population as well.  When I got back, Julia had made some progress, but not with Microsoft as the internet connection was just too slow.  It had been an incredibly frustrating process but she had managed to get the computer to the point where we could at least start typing our diary on it without being online.  It was now 4pm so we packed up and hit the road and smoothly followed our dots in a seamless process on lovely smooth cycle lanes.  It was with relief we hit the next small village and found a park bench to at last have some lunch.  Cheese sandwiches followed by sultana buns and jam with a cup of coffee.  While we were eating we had a friendly Dutch gentleman say something in Dutch, so we said “Sorry, we only speak English”.  He, like most of the Dutch could speak some English and we had a little chat about where we were from and where we were going.  He had a dog with him and we said we liked his dog.  Julia thought he had said the dog’s name was “Buster”, when in actual fact, he had referred to the dog as a bastard who he told us was a cross between a heading dog and a Labrador.  We then talked about tonight’s World Cup game between Holland and Australia which was on in an hour and a half and we told him we, like the rest of Holland, planned to be watching it.  He then says he must walk the dog before the game starts so says goodbye and we do too with Julia adding in a “Bye Buster”.  He politely ignores this and walks on as to him he must have thought Ju was saying “Bye Bastard”.  I explained this to Ju and we cracked up so hard we had tears running down our faces.

Packed up our lunch things and hit the road, hoping to rack up a few kms before finding a pub to watch the game.  Holland is awash with orange and everybody supports their team it seems.  We had lovely cycling with clear skies now and the sun shining, beautiful cycling lanes through countryside and into a little village called Made.  We passed through an area apparently called Schietsberg, (I schiet you not) and then out into the country and into another little village.  Cars and bikes were passing by with everybody dressed in orange with red, white and blue streaks of paint across their cheeks as they headed to friend’s houses to watch the game.  We’d just stopped to take a photo of a windmill when a family dressed in orange came up behind us on their bikes and asked us if we were going to watch the game as Pete had his orange shirt on.  We said we planned to when we came across the next bar.  They said “Why don’t you come to our friend’s house and watch it with us?” So we did!  There were about three couples with their six toddlers and about three other guys and us.  They gave us a couple of ice cold beers each and we watched a very exciting game – thought Aussie played really well but were glad Holland came through in the end.

The Mum from our family, Sandra, had taken the little two home on her bike at halftime as they were getting tired.  The game finished at 8pm and after thanking our host Marcel, we followed Niels back to his farm where he offered us a spot to put up our tent.  Unfortunately it was about 8 km back in the direction we had just come from.  So even though we cycled a total of 26 km today, we progressed only about 10km!  

Festa keeps watch over our tent - probably smells those vegeburgers

We set the tent up and cooked a late dinner of what we discovered was a vege burger (very nice too) with pasta and steamed broccoli with a cheese sauce, made by chopping cheese into the hot macaroni with a bit of boiling water.  And it was delicious!  Finished with a cuppa while we started to catch up with our blog writing.  At least we can write it offline now.  All we need tomorrow is a decent internet connection to be able to post it.