I am now back home after a great holiday.
The sheer volume of bicycles, different people cycling and the wonderful variety of bikes was absolutely fascinating. I also loved the way many of the bikes had been personalised to display their owner's individuality from unusual paint jobs to flowers as accessories. The fashion also seems to be to have the handlebars as high as possible! I saw cyclists texting, with dogs on leads and with passengers sitting side saddle on the pannier racks! As is usual with me, I forgot to take photos!
The day after visiting Amsterdam, we had a trip to Leiden. As the storm had died down, we decided that this was going to be our cycling day.
As this was a fairly touristy coach trip to Holland (accompanying my sons' church choir who were performing three concerts in the area), most of the shops, museums and tourist attractions had notices and information in English as well as Dutch.
Not so the bike hire shop. It seemed as if two English tourists wanting to hire bikes was a fairly unusual scenario. They wanted 100euros deposit and would not take a credit card number as security instead. As we were catching the ferry that evening, I did not want to be stuck with 100Euros that I then had to pay commission to change back so that, unfortunately, was the end of that idea.
I will definitely return in the future and am still keen on the idea of riding a Dutch bike (though will be giving the texting, dogs and passengers a miss!)