Rather than a diary, this is a few short notes about both areas from a cycling point of view which might be useful for anyone planning to visit.

Otterlo

There is a good-sized and well-stocked Spar supermarket. It has a cash machine and a post office counter.

I recommend Geerts Tweewielers next to the Spar for hiring bikes. There’s another bike hire business on the main road but it’s only a hire shop; Geerts is a bike shop. You know the difference.

Picture: Google StreetView

Eating out choices are limited. De Waldhoorn is the most obvious and popular but we thought the menu was uninspiring. ‘t Smulhuis is an Eastern/Indonesian style restaurant where we had one perfectly satisfactory evening meal but weren’t inspired to go back. We didn’t try the pizza place next to Spar, nor either of the two up-market hotel restaurants out of the town centre.

Hoge Veluwe National Park

Otterlo is one of three places with entry to the Hoge Veluwe National Park. Rather than being open access you have to pay to go into this national park. In August 2022 a day pass cost €11.30 for adults, €5.65 for children between 6 and 13 years, free for children under 6 years.

If you plan to explore the park it’s worth paying a little extra for the map available at the entrance kiosk.

You can pay to park just outside the Otterlo entrance, or pay more to take your car into the park itself. Taking a bicycle into the park is free.

The Park operates an impressive ‘white bicycle‘ scheme. Just inside the entrance you will find a large bicycle park full of white bicycles which are free to use – you just take one and ride it away. Most of them are adult size with step-through frames, but there are smaller sizes, some special machines, even a few tandems. Saddle and handlebar heights can be adjusted by hand. One warning though – the bikes have no brake levers on the handlebars, so no rim or disc brakes. The only brake is a back-pedal brake on  the rear hub, which if you haven’t ridden one before takes a bit of getting used to. The bikes have no gears, but as the Park is virtually flat that isn’t a problem.

If you use a white bike to ride to one of the visitor attractions in the Park you leave your bike in the general bike park you will find there. There’s no reservation system, so when you’re ready to move on you can retrieve the same bike if it’s still there, otherwise you just take another one. At the end of your visit you leave the bike in the bike park by the entrance.

With my own bike and the hired bikes my family were riding we carried locks to secure our bikes when we left them to visit one of the sites in the Park.

Once inside the Park cars, bikes and walkers are effectively separated. The map you can buy at the entrance shows the different roads, tracks and paths for each, and waymarks help you navigate. The cycle paths are hard-surfaced, traffic-free and safe. There’s even an emergency help system designed primarily for the white bikes: every 200 metres on the cycle paths there is a sign on the path, either a metal plaque inset in the surface or a painted sign, with a location code and a phone number to call for assistance.

Cycle path causeway

Here is a Komoot map of a ride I did around the south of the Park after exploring the northern sector with my family earlier in the day. As you can see, it would be easy to cover the whole Park in a short day. The landscape is a mixture of mixed woodland and open heath. In the exceptionally dry summer weather the heath was brown and the ground, which is mostly sand, was bone dry. I found cycling through this landscape monotonous at first, but after a while it became mesmerising. Naturalists visit the Park for its wildlife; I didn’t see much at this time of day apart from a family of three wild boar which crossed the cycle path about 200 metres ahead of me but had disappeared by the time I got there.

Kröller-Müller Art Museum

Inside the National Park this internationally famous art museum is the reason most people come to Otterlo. It has the second-largest Van Gogh collection in the world along with major works by other modern artists. The extensive grounds house a large collection of outdoor modern sculptures. I will just say it is AMAZING! Follow the link if you’re interested, and if you are interested, don’t miss it!

Ede

The four of us took advantage of the legendary Dutch cycle paths to spend a day outside the National Park riding to Ede, the main town in the district. Considerably larger than Otterlo, with a good mix of shops, cafés, open spaces and on the day of our visit a lively market. I show the route here just as a demonstration of what’s possible. The only tricky part was getting out of Ede, as the route wiggles through the residential suburbs for a couple of kilometres before reaching the open countryside. The 7 year old in our group managed the 15 miles happily in the day, even while riding a remarkably heavy small bike with no gears – rather a come-down from the good bike she has at home. The other two adults rode their hired Dutch-style bikes. A coffee/soda stop and lunch in Ede helped keep young spirits and energy levels up, and an afternoon break at Boerderij Mossel on the way back, where various cakes, biscuits and chips were consumed, completed the ride nicely.

Boerderij Mossel is a farm which has expanded into the hospitality business. There is no public road to it so the only motor vehicles permitted are those serving the business or which have booked accommodation. Otherwise the customers are cyclists or hikers. It was busy on this Saturday afternoon.

Geel

Geel is a small town in the Belgian province of Antwerp, with a population a little over 40,000. It has a quietly prosperous feel to it, with a wide range of shops and places to eat and drink. The market square (Markt) is the centre of the town – a car-free wide open space surrounded on two sides by bars and restaurants, some with classy apartments above; the dominant church is on a third side.

It is best known for its association with Saint Dimpna (Dimphna or Dymphna), and through her the town’s hospital founded in the middle ages and which developed innovative approaches to helping people with mental illnesses. There is a church in her name and a hospital museum. Read the stories on the links for more information.

‘Geel’ is the Dutch/Flemish word for ‘yellow’, which Google translates on some of its pages.

Eating and drinking

I only tried places on or just off the main square.

• The Irish Pub. Apart from serving Guinness this pub is about as Irish as a jellied eel stall in Southend-on-Sea. The craic wasn’t there when I was.
• Het Forum. Pleasant place for a beer and to watch whatever’s happening in the square. I wasn’t impressed with the food menu so didn’t eat there.
• De Kruimel. Another good place for a beer, and they do a good pizza.
• Brasserie Flore. This is where the prosperous middle classes of Geel seem to go to eat. I had two good evening meals there; it was busy both times but the service was friendly and smooth. Not the cheapest, but to me it was worth it. The place next door, de Post, looks as if it competes with Flore but my AirBnB hostess shuddered at the thought of going there.
• Bart Bar. An odd little place down a side street, open until late.

Cycling

The key to cycling in Flanders (the northern part of Belgium) is the astonishing network of cycle routes which run between numbered connecting nodes, or ‘knooppunten’. You can plan your ride using the online fietsroute map to connect whatever nodes you choose, download or print a list of the numbers and follow the list using the physical signposts on the ground. Better still, download your chosen route as a gpx file and load it onto your handlebar computer for belt-and-braces navigation.

The cycle paths I used were virtually all completely segregated from motor traffic. Where they weren’t the roads were very quiet back lanes in the countryside, or coloured sections of tarmac through quiet residential areas, or small town streets where cyclists have priority. Otherwise I was riding through open farmland, shady forest (cool on a hot day), or alongside big canals.

I particularly wanted to visit two features I had read about. Just over the provincial border the Province of Limburg declares itself a ‘cycling paradise’ – see here and here. They hired architects (I think, or artists, or both) to design what have become “Fietsen door de Bomen” (Bikes through the Trees) and “Fietsen door het Water” (Bikes through the Water). In the first, a spiral ramp takes you up from ground level to the tops of the pine trees. In the second you ride on a sunken path below the surface of the surrounding lake. I have put my own pictures below, but the links have more and better.

• Fietsen door de Bomen
• Fietsen door het Water

Knooppunt on Albertkanaal

Forest cycle path

Fietsen door de Bomen

Fietsen door de Bomen

Fietsen door de Bomen

Fietsen door het Water

Fietsen door het Water

Title: Spain to Norway on a Bike Called Reggie
Author: Sykes, Andrew P
Published by: Summersdale
Year: 2017
First published: Summersdale, 2017
Date reviewed: 06.17
ISBN: 978-1-78685-170-3 (Kindle edition)

It tells the story of his solo bike ride in 2015 from the southernmost tip of Europe, Tarifa in Spain, to its northernmost point, Nordkapp in Norway. He covered 7500km in just under 100 days. In a change from his previous book he has abandoned the straightjacket of a one-chapter-a-day format. Instead he writes one chapter for each degree of latitude he completes – all 35 of them. This gives him more flexibility to be selective in what he writes.

So we get a mix of his cycling experiences: the weather and the terrain; food, hotels and campsites; some well-chosen snippets of history; descriptions and stories about some of the people he meets along the way. As anyone who’s ever done a long-distance bike ride knows, each of these can become important at some point. Sykes’ self-deprecating and sometimes quirky humour is still there, more natural and less forced than in “Along the Med” – that editor again, I guess. His travelling style is still the same though. He has an overall plan and a general idea about his route, but each day’s ride is taken as it comes rather than being meticulously planned.

I started identifying with Andrew as he got further north in Norway, as a long time ago I did a five week ride in Sweden and Norway when the central part of the peninsula was genuinely remote. In fact his track and mine coincided for a short section somewhere between Lillehammer and Trondheim. I can appreciate how it must feel to be riding into the wind and rain in the far north, wondering where the next opportunity will be to dry out and buy some food and a hot drink. At least on my journey I didn’t have to face the tunnels – I didn’t come across any (if indeed any had been built then).

Well-deserved congratulations to Andrew. It was an innovative challenge and an epic ride, and he kept going even when his spirits were low on those ‘Mercedes days’. Writing this in the summer of 2017 I can’t overlook an unwritten message in the book; he did the whole journey without formalities or a single delay at any of the national borders. Let’s hope that’s still possible in 2020.