Monthly Archive for August, 2007

I’m only just starting to catch up on all the little geeky things I’ve gotten behind on these last few months. I got a few rolls of film back from July yesterday and as I was digging through piles of papers and whatnot that my scanner was buried under I realized that I had neither labeled nor scanned any of my photos from our rather ill-fated bike trip from Den Haag to Brussels.

But! I did manage to label, scan, organize, and post the last of my photos from Austria and photos from a short bike trip we took to Friesland in late July.

On July 25th and 26th, we biked from Zwolle to Heerenveen. Back in February on our way to Paris, we sat next to a photographer who’d been working on a book at something called the Eco Cathedral. An artist named Louis Le Roy has been building structures out of brick and other bits of building materials and then letting nature grow over what he’d built on a large plot of land just outside the tiny Friesland town of Mildam. He’s been doing it since the 1970s. The project sounded interesting to me so when Nick mentioned wanting to do a short bike trip in the Netherlands before he left, I suggested that we go see it.

We’d actually planed on going from Zwolle to Heerenveen in one day and then from Heerenveen to Groningen the next. I’m not sure if we’d just been insanely underestimating the distances between these cities or if we were just extremely slow for some reason because it took two days just to get to Heerenveen.

The slow pace turned out to be just fine if a tad frustrating. We took a train from Amsterdam to Zwolle in the morning of the 25th. Zwolle is a major train hub so we’d actually been in the train station there a few times switching trains on longer trips. It’s nice to see cities whose name you’d seen a million times as your passing through.

Like most of The Netherlands, as soon as we got few kilometers outside of the city we were in farm land. This is true even in the heavily urbanized area that Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Den Haag are located in. What the actual farm land looks like changes a bit from place to place, though. I remember North and South Holland as being mostly flat, treeless fields with livestock. I remember the area around Zwolle as being a lot of corn fields. There was a section towards the end of the first day were we biked through fields of corn that were taller and we were.

That first day also had one of the most memorable bits of the trip for me. With all the canals, rives and streams in The Netherlands it makes sense that there would be ferries all over the place. Most of them are big boats that will take cars or lots of people at once but a few of them are just tiny things meant to take a few bicyclists or pedestrians at a time.

We took one of those tiny things that first day. We got to the boat crossing where there were a few people waiting to cross and a hand painted sign underneath a bell that you could ring to get the ferry driver’s attention if they were out of site. As we were waiting for the ferry to cross the river towards us, I noticed a long rope hanging into the water. I thought that was odd until I realized that the rope was actually being used by the ferry to pull it across the water. The ferry driver had these two big, wooden paddles that he used to grab onto the rope and pull the little boat and its passengers across the water. He told us that this was the last such ferry left in the area. They’re all motor powered deals these day. That ferry ride alone was totally worth the bike trip.

I took that picture of me in the mirror right after we got off the ferry. I have no idea why there was a chair with a rather worn mirror sitting there, but I loved it.

We ended the first day by camping in the town of Geithoorn. Geithoorn is absolutely adorable. It’s in a particularly lakey area of The Netherlands and the town is really geared towards summer outdoorsy tourists. There are little boat rental places all over the place renting out row boats and canoes. you can also take boat tours along the canals. The town itself is laid out along a series of small canals connected to each other by low wooden bridges.

The next day is mostly a blur for me. I remember that it rained for part of the day. I remember stopping for coffee at a strange little cafe where there was a giant dog tied up outside. It’s not until we’d almost reached Mildam and the Eco Cathedral that it gets a little more clear.

Bike through any part of The Netherlands for more than a day or so and you’re guaranteed to run into freshly made farmer’s ice cream. We ran into one such place just outside Mildam. There was a dairy with a campsite attached. It sold several flavors of homemade ice cream in little prepackaged cups. ‘les has a policy of making sure to eat as much homemade ice cream as possible while bike touring so we made sure to stop for a little frozen treat.

We got into Mildam shortly after our ice cream stop. Maps of the area posted along the roads are kind enough to mark the Eco Cathedral for us so we had a vague idea of where it was. As we biked down the road into and then out of town we got a bit anxious. Had we passed it? I’d looked at the website and at a few picture of it but I wasn’t sure what exactly we were looking for. It was sort of late in the day and I’d become worried that it would be closed or something. But then ‘les spotted a big stack of building materials on the side of the road and we realized that we’d found it.

The Eco Cathedral is pretty spectacular but it takes a good long walk around before you realize it. The bit you can see form the road seriously just looks like a bunch of piles of construction junk. There’s a little stone wall and a gate to pass through. There’s something that looks a lot like the remains of a fire place. That’s about it. It’s not until you walk in further, behind a bunch of trees that you realize how insanely beautiful and weird the place is.

I mentioned before that the Le Roy’s been building this place since the 70s. The whole place is totally grown over, with the older brick and stone structures hidden behind walls of brush. A lot of it reminded me of pictures of South American pyramids. The whole place was a huge contrast to the plots of land next door to it. You think of The Netherlands as being sort of like the Great Plains states or something. Treeless and flat. But that’s partly because it’s so densely populated that there’s no room for the kind of cold-weather rain forest that would normally be there. No so with the Eco Cathedral. It’s all trees and ferns and thistles. We could see the contrast as we sat on top of a hill close to the end of the Eco Cathedral. One side of a very clear line was densely treed and grown over, the other was a perfectly flat, open grass field. Then we realized that the hill we were standing on to look over to that other field was actually made by Louis Le Roy. All the little rises and uneven ground we’d been walking over was in fact just huge brick construction. The whole place had probably started out as a flat, open field and he’d turned it into a hilly forest with these crazy almost-ruins.

It started raining while we were walking around so we decided to leave after an hour or two of walking around. I’d love to go back in a few years and see how the place has changed. It’s a very short bike ride from Heerenveen, which is only an hour or two by train from Amsterdam. There are bike rentals at pretty much every train station in The Netherlands. It’s totally doable as a day trip. Really, you should go.

We got dinner in Heerenveen that night and then took the train back home. While in Heerenveen, ‘les found a few bottles of local beer for us to try. Damn tasty.

I don’t have a lot of photos from this trip. It was raining for parts of it and the ‘blad doesn’t led itself well to snapshots. They are up on Flickr, though. .Friesland by Bike.

‘les has some good photos up on Flickr in a set called Biking around BeNeLux. I think there are also photos from the Brussels bike trip in there as well.