6 weeks to go
Took a long ride this weekend. This isn't the disciplined execution of a professionally prepared training plan, for this trip the philosophy is to just ride the distances I'm planning to do. Well, once a week anyway.
So this weekend I rode to Arnhem. That was about 120km, with 540m of climbing - rookie numbers by NZ standards, but excitingly high for the Netherlands. It's a repeat of a route I took last year while training for South America, because it had a surprising amount of climbing. And while I have the energy to ride for seven hours, I don't have enough to plan a new route.
From left to right: Nice bright morning. More selfie practice. Low morning light across the water. First sandwich break (the second was less photogenic).
It's autumn! In fact, the best part of autumn. Orange leaves everywhere. They've begun to drop, but while there's excitingly big piles of leaves everywhere, the trees still have dense foliage; so it's still feels lush and lively. It's so early that many trees are still full green.
In a week or two all the leaves will have fallen and turned brown and the trees will have bare branches and everything will be grey, but not yet.
This being the Netherlands, the forest paths are busy, and paved, and kept well. In hindsight the only surface problems were raised ridges from roots; no gaps or holes. Definitely a good way to see the outdoors.
From left to right: Mid ride. The forest entrance; the bikepath is on the right. Paths through the forest. I guess all the leaves are from that one orange tree…
The route zigzags a bit, because I arranged it to avoid main roads and towns. After one photo stop I checked the route and noticed it was two sides of a triangle. Why not take the direct way? Because it's sand. Which only appeared after a minute or two of climbing. I opted to keep going; the surface was firm enough to cycle on. But sand is never safe so I unclipped from the pedals in case things went sideways.
From left to right: More autumn. This walls under this bridge were fully covered in graffiti, and there was a long line of tree stumps too. Weirdly constrained trees. Taking a photo of the route is usually a sign it’s a bad idea - not this time. An especially big leaf pile.
The path ended up squeezing through a narrow gap between foliage, but then returned to asphalt and that was enough offroad for the day.
All in all, a good day's cycle! I got some dinner in Arnhem and rolled back to the train station to discover that due to weekend maintenance work there was a bus replacement. The first bus wouldn't take the bike, but the next one did. I probably should have taken the panniers off but didn't want to give the driver a chance to change his mind; also the panniers meant the pedals weren't scraping the carpet on the floor so much.
It ended up being a cold trip back home. The train didn't go to Central Station so I had to ride - and since I hadn't expected to arrive back this late, my lights weren't properly charged. I suppose this part of the reason I'm doing these rides, find the problems when they don't matter so much.
From left to right: the route went through this arch. Arnhem train station. Amsterdam cycle paths at night.
Speaking of problems: the mis-twisted SP Connect is fixed. The SP Connect company, as I'm sure you're excited to know, provide handlebar mounts and protective phone cases which slot into them. They twist in to lock, and twist out to unlock, and mostly work just fine. I can get the phone out one-handed for photos; if I had to stop to extricate it then I would definitely not take so many.
But once in a while it doesn't quiiiiite untwist properly when getting it out and it the connector is left on a diagonal. But it's not locked and can be rotated back into place. Is that horizontal or vertical? Back in South America, on the rainy ride to Puerto Montt, after stopping to take a picture of all the water streaming down the road, I guessed wrong. The connector clicked into place mercilessly and the phone refused to clip onto the handlebar mount. It had to go in the raincoat pocket for the rest of the day. I damaged my fingernails trying to get it untwisted, Google searches found absolutely nothing useful, and I had to swap over to the backup phone case because I couldn't fix it.
So I wasn't really excited to repeat the fruitless Google searches for how to fix it. A year's delay didn't improve the results. The SP connect website had some search feature but it was equally fruitless. So I gave up and tried using the contact form. After some fruitful emails with an actual human, the outcome is that they have a 5€ tool to fix it! It has already arrived (as you'd guess) and it's in my electronics bag with the fixed backup case, in case it's needed again.
Speaking of things that will be needed again, I should go charge those lights.
