Flowers and stuff

April 23

Along with lax drug laws, legal euthanasia, and the well-known red-light district, one of the things the Netherlands are known for is flowers! (one of those things is not like the others.) Flowers are a large part of the Dutch culture - in dutch-infested Michigan you have the tulip time festival, and Calvinism's five theological points of TULIP were developed at a church synod in Holland.  I already talked in an earlier post about how flowers are shipped out daily from dutch markets to all over the world.  So, while it is springtime and before the flowers were cut, we decided to go check out the famous Dutch flower fields.

We left in the morning on our bikes in search of the fields - although we had a general set of directions, soon we were resorting to asking other bikers or gas station attendants about where we could find the flower fields. Since we were out in the countryside, the wind was blowing strong, which slowed us down. In the Netherlands, when the wind is blowing, there are only 2 directions that it goes - almost directly against you or directly against you.  There is no alternative.  At times, I have biked to class, encountering a strong headwind both coming from and going to class.  Its crazy. The combined factors of us zigzagging around the countryside with little idea of where we were going and that Dutch wind meant that it took a lot longer than expected to find the fields.

Once we did find them, though, it was really impressive - there was a huge range of color that went on for a really long distance.  We took pictures for a while, and ate lunch by the fields, and then began to head back.
One of the guys in our group wanted to bike around longer, so he split off to do his own thing. Unfortunately, he was the only one with a bike pump, and 5 minutes after he left, my bike got a flat tire. Ugghh.  We were 3 kilometers from the closest bike shop, so I hopped on the bike rack of one of the guys, while someone else wheeled my bike along his as he pedaled.

The hilarity continued - I was going to have the bike shop replace the inner tube, figuring that they could do a quicker and more efficient job, but was informed that the shop was closing within 5 minutes of us arriving, not to reopen until 4 days later (this was right before Easter).

Instead, I bought a cheap patch kit and a pump, and we set about fixing it ourselves.  The pump worked fine, but the patches from the patch kit wouldn't stick, so every few miles I would have to stop and refill my leaky tire.  All in all, we ended up biking 80 kilometers that day, and I was pretty exhausted from biking with a half-flat tire on the way home, so I just crashed for the rest of the night.

Depicted: the very definition of suave.