For the record, trying to move out of your house on a bike with a thesis deadline that strictly coincides with your leaving date is not a good plan, no matter how good your intentions to plan ahead and send everything home to your parents. It will end in tears and you will find yourself landed with all those things you find on your moving day when it really hits that you can't leave anything behind. You may also find yourself in the odd situation of trying to explain in Dutch to the man who lives next to the closed charity shop why you are trying to leave a kilogram of spare change outside it.

My friends invited me to stay with them for a couple of days in Utrecht before leaving so that I could sleep and recover after the caffeine marathon I got myself into to finish the thesis. This made all the difference, and I will not forget their kindness while I was struggling to keep hold. I was sad to leave them but I was already a day behind the planned schedule which was to take me to Hamburg in less than a week so I said the difficult goodbyes to friends who would soon be scattered across the globe and hit the road.

I headed North East out of Utrecht towards Zwolle via a gap in my mapping. In the cyclist's paradise that is the Netherlands, heading off the end of one map vaguely in the direction of your next one is not a cause for anxiety. As long as you keep the sun on the right side of you you will always be able to find a bike path headed in the right direction. This being the case, the maps you do have are not so much to guide you from A to B but to ensure that you take the nicest route, avoiding long stretches of path parallel to a main road, however tempting those red signs may be. I also find that maps provide hours of low key entertainment in the evenings. Once the next days route is approximately worked out, I would contentedly disengage my brain to a level just sufficient to plumb the depths of an AskReddit thread and look over the map in its endless detail. 

I found a bench looking out over some sort of swampy bird reserve come wind farm and prepared my first dose of chocolate spread, with a little bread on the side. Bit of an odd combination, but maybe they only wanted the swampy flies-less-than-blade-height type of bird to stick around. I also had the pleasure of mutually unintelligible conversation with an old man passing on a mobility scooter while applying my sun cream. Perhaps he was telling me about a special type of spinning blade avoiding bird native only to Gelderland.

When I became tired of dodging wild roosters I began to cast my eye around for somewhere to set up camp and was thrilled to soon see a sign proclaiming the welcomeness of fietsers within. As I negotiated with the owner of the site (and when I say 'negotiated' I mean it in the sense of 'how much am I about to agree to pay you?') I felt rather sad that I had just become sufficiently proficient in Dutch to carry out this transaction and I would only have opportunity to use it for two more days. This is, of course, clearly bunk, because I had had ample opportunity to speak Dutch to people beforehand, I just had been afraid of not doing it perfectly.

My only cycling trip previous to this one was 4 days around the tulip fields and Rotterdam and on that trip I just carried enough food for the whole thing, not having a good idea of how I would go about buying food and what I would do with my bike. On this trip I wasn't really any further forward on this but I clearly wouldn't be able to carry a month's worth of food so I just took some and figured it out when it ran out. When it came to it I didn't really have much of a choice but to leave my bike locked up outside the shop and go in. I was worried because I knew that even taking my valuables inside, all the gear sitting unlocked on my bike represented a not insubstantial financial investment. I never had any problems outside shops though, even in big cities, in one of which I caught someone stealing my bike at half past two in the morning (see Norway, when I get around to that tale). I suppose it's just not the sort of valuable thieves are interested in, or I was lucky.

I constructed the above mentioned culinary delight in a town called, bizarrely it seemed to me, Tweede (Second) Exloërmond. I suppose this isn't really any different from having 'Old' and 'New' in otherwise identical names of settlements except that if a third, fourth or eighty-sixth Exloërmond should pop up then there will be no problem in naming it. 

While sitting there I became aware of two young boys attempting to sneak up on me. They would hide behind trees, crawl between hedges and make frantic dashes across open ground before returning to cover at a safe distance if I ever looked directly at them. This repeated and seemed to entertain them, and admittedly me, for some time. While they were just children playing, I was strongly reminded of the feeling of getting to know a new cat or dog and what I imagine it would be like to tame a wild animal. This was compounded by their confusion at the strange sounds I made in an effort to communicate with them and by the fact that I gave them each a stroopwafel when they managed to get close enough. With the game over, I packed up my ingredients and returned my feet to the pedals, just when they had become accustomed to solid ground. As I left I reflected on what a pleasure it can be to just be kind to people without any assumption that, at best, you want something in return or, at worst, pose some danger to them.

Next: Part 2 - Germany