Suns rise and suns set,
Winds blow across built islands,
Hail falls in springtime.
What a day.
We woke up to a lovely breakfast with our hosts. We learned that it's "very Dutch" to eat butter and chocolate sprinkles on bread. Also, this seems to be the one place in Europe where peanut butter is popular ("Have you tried this before?" they asked us. "It's very good!"), and in fact where a lot of peanut products are consumed. Strange.
Anyway, after some breakfast, coffee, tea, and cookies, we set off down the road. We wound up passing Amerika, where we had intended to camp last night, and snapped the requisite photo of the sign. :P Our hosts were discussing yesterday the Dutch affinity for naming places they perceived as "far away" after other places they perceived as far away. For instance, there are other towns in the middle of nowhere in Holland called Moskau, etc.
A few kilometres into the day, I got a call from my friend Bart from Antwerp to confirm our stay there. :D Hurray, hosts! It was nice to have that out of the way. But then the weather took a turn for the worse, deciding to alternately pour rain and blast us with wind. During one of the windy times, we stopped at a particularly confounding intersection to look at our map and were pelted with, I kid you not, hail for a few minutes. In May. What the hail.
Our route for the day was to head somewhat northward, followed by taking a jaunt southward to a town called Urk. The cycling map that we have of the northern part of the Netherlands informed us that there was a ferry from Urk that would take us across the Markermeer (the section of water between the peninsula containing Amsterdam and the larger part of northern Holland) that was a part of the national cycling network. Urk is in the middle of what appears to be a man-made island: on the map the thing has perfectly straight edges and has been divided neatly into grids of farmland, with just a few roads leading through to towns that have been evenly spaced around its periphery. There is also what appears to be a scenic (?) bike path around the coast, so we decided that this would be a reasonable choice, as it leads us straight to Urk.
Then came the shit. We followed some of the national cycling network trails along a canal, assuming that they would be well-kempt, but instead we were greeted with sheep milling about all over the path and some patches that were nearly unnavegable due to massive piles of poo. We choked through the smell for several kilometres until we could get off the canal and onto another path.
Along this next stretch, we faced headwinds of roughly 50km/h for around 30 kilometres. There were parts we simply had to walk because we couldn't get enough momentum to cut through with the profiles of our giant bags attached to the backs of our bicycles. It was a very, very slow 30 kilometres.
Finally, we reached the damned island, where we fought some even stronger headwinds for a while until our route turned to the south. At that point, we were simply being blown sideways, which was preferable to backwards, at the very least. Note to self: do not underestimate coastal "breezes."
The day wore on, and we admired the wind farms (seems like a sensible place to put some, based on what we had just experienced) along the coast. We also puzzled over herds of sheep that appeared to have been spraypainted. The sun was beginning to set as we rolled into Urk.
Urk was an adorable town with a lighthouse and a port and not too much else going on. We pedaled around the port for several minutes, attempting to find a boat that looked like a ferry to Amsterdam, but didn't see anything. Perhaps it only runs every hour? Perhaps it's on the other side right now? Best to ask.
I walked into a restaurant (which was way to fancy for the way I was dressed and how I smelled after a day of cycling, but anyway) and asked one of the staff if he could please point me at the ferry to Amsterdam. He looked at me sadly, "Did you read about that in a book on cycling?" "Yes," I said. "It's so sad. That ferry actually only runs during July and August."
WHAT.
So we apparently have no way to get across the water from this tiny town that is nearly inaccessible by any reasonable means of transportation. There is no train station. Buses certainly won't accept bicycles. What to dooooooooo??
We elected to fume about it over dinner, which was a very interesting and tasty set of salmon and emmantaler cheese pancake sandwiches with fresh strawberries. We find interesting food on this trip. We pored over our map for a while, and it appeared that the best option was to bike to a town a bit to the south (did I mention there wasn't much going on in Urk? Yeah, they didn't have a campsite, either.) called Lelystad, which was 1) the nearest town, 2) had a campsite, and 3) had a train station. Unfortunately, "a bit to the south" meant an additional 30km when it was already getting dark.
We sucked it up, though. We rolled into Lelystad around 23:00 after admiring the sunset over the wind farms and water. The campsite office was closed, but we stuffed a note into the mailbox explaining that we would pay in the morning and to please not bother us too early because we were exhausted from our ride. Here we are.