A country passed is
A country seen, if you take
The time to look 'round.
We headed to our next country today! That's three down, my friends. :D
Let's see, out of Rotterdam, we had no map to guide us, so we took some photos of maps in a gas station. For some reason, in certain lands that we pass through people don't believe in reasonable-to-small-sized road maps, preferring instead to sell only the large atlas-style ones that are useful only in cars or on shelves. So we navigate with photos.
To the south of Rotterdam, there is a pair of rivers. The first one is fairly narrow, so we were treated to a trip through a bicycles-only tunnel that ran alongside the car tunnel underneath it. It was frigid... but we raced each other to keep ourselves warm. ;) Boy was I pooped upon emerging at the other end.
The navigational aspects of the day were rather disappointing. We failed to see any reasonable way to get to Antwerpen via non-motorway roads, which led to a huge amount of inefficiency. The gray sky didn't bring any rain, but its decidedly oppressive forbearance made us less than excited to put effort into bicycling.
As we rolled across the border into Belgium eventually (passing over our last drempel... sad!), we were battered and sad. A little way across the border we knew we were pretty close to Antwerpen already, but we elected to take a train the last 10km or so due to poor spirits and tired legs. We hopped on and bought our second class tickets and the more-expensive-than-people-tickets bicycle tickets, and the wonderful conductor took pity on us and invited us to sit in first class with him. It was a really lovely train ride. :)
Upon arriving in Antwerpen Centraal, we borrowed a phone from a random kind stranger to call our host's neighbours to get our key. The admittedly-strange situation for our accomodations in Antwerpen are that a friend I met in Geneva, Bart, agreed to host us from afar by lending us the keys to his apartment. He has a few friends in town who agreed to show us around and teach us about the city if they were free, which was really nice. Anyway, we called up his neighbours and they came to pick us up at the station and give us the keys.
We settled into Bart's apartment for the night, and enjoyed the relaxation powers of his bathtub. Mmmm. Nothing like a warm bath to soothe aching cycle legs.