Riding For Rwanda Day 6

HEART OF HOLLAND RIDE - DAY SIX- June 27, 2024

There will be a test.

Do those words conjure up any angst when you hear them? They sure do for me - so when our cycling guide made this announcement on one of our breaks today I shuddered. What? How could there be a test - we had gotten by all week with some random loose translations - every now and then our guide, the captain or staff might say, oh yea, and in English.

And now there would be a test! To make matters worse when the test time came after dinner - our guide numbered us off into groups “eins, zwei, drei.”

Marlene and I ended up in different groups. Oh dear. BUT what happened was quite beautiful - the groups all huddled together and they included us as one of them.

The interesting thing we have discovered this week is - almost everyone on board has a “little” bit of English but they are nervous to speak it for fear of embarrassment - but when forced to they are willing.

And now the surprise. The questions on the quiz were random like where did we dock on the 3rd night, what was our dinner main dish on Tuesday etc. but there were also some really fascinating facts.

Random questions (some were on the test 😁 and some are things we have learned)

From the north tip to the south tip the Netherlands is 350km BUT there 153,000 km of cycling paths (that’s 3.8 times around the planet)
There are 22 million bikes in this smallish country - some of them have windshields.
3 Dutch multi-national companies - KLM, Heineken and Phillips. (the Dutch like their beer - our German friends like black beer - neither Marlene or I are beer drinkers but we definitely didn’t turn down a lemon Radler at the end of a long ride on a very hot day)
The guest list on our boat included someone from each decade 40’s thru to 80’s (oh, by the way, that 80 year old that fell in the ditch the other day was a mountaineer and hiker well into her 70’s!)
Our cycling guide is a professor most of the year, he leads about 7 groups a year on a trip when he is not teaching. For fun he did a solo 900km ride last year - oh yea and he is turning 62 this year.
There are 12 provinces in the Netherlands (Flevoland bring the newest in 1986 - reclaimed from water)
A barge like the one that has been home for Marlene and I this week would cost us about 600,000 euros to purchase.
St. John’s Cathedral was built by the Roman Catholics and became property of the Dutch Reformed Protestants in 1573 and is renown as the longest cathedral at 123 Metres and home to 72 stained glass windows.
An average e-bike on this barge can go at least 100km on level 1.
And finally both Marlene and my kids attended a CRC private school founded by the Dutch in Canada - imagine our surprise to learn 57% of the population declare no religious affiliation!

Off to the worlds largest flower market - no surprise there.