Tuesday 19 June 2018
This was our planned route for the day:
After a hearty breakfast we packed up all our belongings. Unfortunately the clothes we had washed yesterday afternoon hadn’t dried and overall our clothing is getting a bit whiffy. This isn’t the end of the world but it is one of the discomforts of cycle touring (I like clean clothes!)
Today we were heading to Tilburg to stay at the home of one of Klaus’s colleagues, John. As Tilburg isn’t that far away from Roosendaal we decided to go via Baarle Nassau/Baarle Hertog. More later. This made the journey 80km.
We fetched our bikes from the bicycle parking place – what a brilliant idea, I hope to see more of these in future! Then under heavy skies which threatened rain we set off again.
The way out of Roosendaal was a bit easier than our way in, but it was still a bit fiddly with various road crossings, drempels and rough surfaces. This turned out to be the theme for today which made the ride today rather harder than expected.
We rode south east towards Schijf and then back northwards again towards Breda. We had a mixture of road surfaces but our progress was reasonable. There wasn’t much wind and it was mostly behind us.
We had decided we would stop in Breda for a cuppa but weren’t exactly sure where to go as our Garmins had us just bypassing it. In the end we had a bit of a fiddly ride to try to cross a main road (eventually we found a bridge, having taken a wrong road that led us only to a hospital with no way into the town). We weren’t actually in the centre of Breda but inn Princenhage, but they had a chocolate milk drink for Klaus and I had a tea of course.
It was a bit warmer today so nice to sit outside and watch people walk past.
It was a more sticky day, so not particularly hot but I found it a bit sweaty riding. Yesterday I had worn some arm warmers to keep my arms away from the side of thee Velomobile (I keep getting a sweat rash, but the arm warmers didn’t help that much). Today I just had a buff over my right arm which worked better to reduce the irritation (no Lycra, I think I am slightly sensitive to it when mixed with sweat) but only one buff so the left arm was bare. But it seemed to be OK overall.
After Breda we headed south towards the Belgian border. At Strijbeek we were probably only a couple of hundred metres away. We had some good country lanes but also lots of slow and difficult riding through towns and villages. Brick paving, drempels, awkward cycle paths… But the countryside bits were very nice.
The landscape has changed again, there are more trees – and also some more warnings for the Oak Processionary caterpillar so Klaus was riding with his arms inside the Velomobile when we saw these. Fortunately our itches have mostly healed up, although Klaus is now suffering from sunburnt/windburnt lips.
A view across to Belgium:
We found ourselves on cycle paths which were much less well maintained than others on this trip. There were lot of tree roots which pushed up the asphalt and made it very bumpy and rattly. As well as this there were long stretches of wide tiles/stones which tend to end up undulating a bit so we were bumping in and out of dips in the road. Millie scrapes regularly in this situation and the sound is a bit unnerving. And of course there were more drempels, big ones that meant I scraped on the way up and on the way down again.
We ended up on a very long road from Chaam down to Baarle and this was a narrow-ish cycle path. It was better than the road beside it though; that was brick paving. Except after a while it wasn’t, it turned into sand. I began to worry that our nice smooth asphalt might turn into sand too, then we would have a long ride back again. Fortunately the asphalt continued right to the end at our planned lunch stop in Baarle Nassau in the Netherlands. Or was it Baarle Hertog in Belgium?
Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau is a very interesting part of the world as there are enclaves of Belgium within the Netherlands, and within these Belgian enclaves a few Netherlands exclaves. The picture below shows it – H is a Belgian enclave, N a Dutch one.
You can read about this in Wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Hertog and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Nassau.
When we arrived we had to stop our bikes on the border. This was just outside the pancake cafe where we stopped for some lunch. As you can see, Millie’s nose is in Belgium in the town of Baarle-Hertog and her tail is in NL in Baarle-Nassau.
A sign on the pavement explains it in Dutch.
And here is a screenshot of Google Maps where we were sitting for lunch. In NL, but Belgium was about 20 metres south.
This is a tourist town because of these weird borders. THere are restaurants with some tables in NL and some in Belgium and the licensing rules used to be different so diners would move to another table if they wanted to stay later. There is also a house whose front door is smack bang on the border so the house has two numbers, one in Baarle-Nassau and one in Baarle-Hertog. I wonder how you decide which country you live in if your house straddles the border – presumably the one with the lower taxes!
Here you see a line of bricks zigzagging across the road; this is the border, with Belgium on the right. The person sitting at a table with a bike propped up beside them is in NL but the bike is actually in Belgium.
It was time for lunch so I had some soup and then followed it with one of my favourite bike touring treats – poffertjes!
We had noticed the menu also offered ‘Banoffee’ so ordered that and it turned out to be a Banoffee ice cream with popcorn.
It’s a fascinating town but what spoilt our time there was the large volume of traffic passing through the whole time. Huge HGVs were turning the sharp corner to take a different road right in the middle of the town where people were sitting outside eating lunch. There were also lots of cars. It’s noisy, spoils the air quality and makes it less relaxing. It’s a real shame they couldn’t pedestrianise it.
The route between Baarle and Tilburg is a former railway line that is now a cycle path. We had great hopes for this as our day had been difficult with some tiring riding. But we were actually a bit disappointed.
The cycle path diversion as they were building a new bridge wasn’t too bad – the gap was wide enough for Humphrey and Millie:
But the path quality was not great. It was very rough asphalt, not particularly wide and at every crossing of a road the cycle path had to give way. This seems very inefficient as there was lots more bike traffic than car traffic.
After the railway had closed a few businesses had built across the old route so there were a couple of diversions. These tended to follow the “add a 90 degree bend into the cycle path just before a crossing of a major road on a slight incline with a wide hedge beside it”. In other words, those of us in velomobiles with closed wheel boxes have to do a 6 point turn to get around the corner, at which point we can’t see if any traffic is coming and can only start very slowly as it’s uphill. Fun.
After 17 kilometres we arrived in the outskirts of Tilburg. At first this route was OK but as we got closer to the centre we had to do more stopping and starting again. This is tiring for me as Millie takes a bit of effort to get going. I was feeling tired despite the relatively short distance. The road surfaces today had doubled the effort required for this ride!
We went right to the centre of Tilburg on a cycle route and then moved past and to the north east where Klaus’s colleague John lived. The final 5km were a reasonable speed at last, and we arrived at our host’s house at 4:30pm. John and his wife Marieke welcomed us, gave us tea and let us shower and, most wonderful of all, washed ALL our cycle clothing! I was so relieved about this as I was beginning to feel very uncomfortable in it; my clothes were smelly and were irritating my skin a bit. Hurrah for a washing machine!
After we were showered and freshened up we had a lovely dinner that John cooked for us, an indonesian stir fry. Really tasty!
And then it was time for them to try Humphrey and Millie!
Marieke is a little short for the velomobiles and could only just see out.
John was a better height although his legs were slightly shorter than mine.
In conclusion, Marieke preferred Humphrey and they both though that he seemed more solid and comfortable. The extra 9kg are put to good use!
So it was really nice to have a cosy evening with chums. Tomorrow we ride to Weert which is just really a staging post on our way to Maastricht, but the B&B where we will stay has a 9.8 rating on Booking.com so that should be interesting!
And this is where we have ridden so far on our tour…
We only have a few more days of touring. We are really enjoying ourselves and are already discussing where we should go next year!