Amsterdam

Amsterdam was a hoot and a holler people. And seeing that we're on a bike tour, it was very fitting to find ourselves in one of the most bike-friendly cities in the world. Amsterdam is also a very small city, with close to 1 million people, so the streets can be very busy and if you're not careful you're just as liable to get hit by a biker as you are by a car.

Will and I made a mad dash from Rheine to Amsterdam in order to be there for the Dutch National Holiday - Queen's Day. As far as I could gather Queen's Day basically goes like this: everybody dresses up in orange clothing, floods the streets and gets all rowdy. And of course, there is drinking involved.

After making it in time for the holiday, we had about a week and a half before two friends joined us - my girlfriend Katie and good friend Sal from Los Angeles. So in the meantime we did a lot of relaxing, reading and drinking coffee. We were also accompanied by Rob for a weekend who took the train in from his temporary home in Paris. The quartet was dynamite!

The city is interlaced with canals and when the bridges are lit at night it really gives the place a magical feeling.

In Amsterdam everybody bikes. Well not everybody. But, as I learned from Professor Wray's book, Pedal Power, 40% of all trips (like to the store, school, etc) in Amsterdam are made by bike. That compares to 1% in the US. We've got work to do people. But beyond the pro-bike rhetoric, it is fascinating to see the way in which a biking culture has been developed and continues to grow. For example, it is not uncommon to see 4 people on one bike - 3 kids (one in the front and two in the back) and a mom or dad making the machine go. But what fascinated me most was the variation in demographics of bikers -- teenagers biking on dates; teenagers in mobs of 10, 2o or 30 people just riding around doing what teenagers do; moms and dads with multiple kids in tow, grandmas and grandpas with tulips in their front baskets, business executives in suits; twenty-somethings doing their thing; people with dogs in their front baskets or back panniers; really just everybody. And the bikes are designed for everything imaginable. I especially liked seeing the bikes with the wheel-barrow fixed to the front often carrying multiple children and/or pets.

A simple idea in this respect is brought to life by the Dutch - that the bike is a sensible and logical way to move one person from one place to another. Doing so is healthy; it reduces society's (beyond out-of-control) carbon footprint; it is cheaper than driving a car; and it is fun.