Tulip Pedals

Every once in a while, I’ll have an idea. A wonderful, awful idea. The kind of idea that commandeers my heart and wallet before my brain even knows it’s been boarded. The kind of idea that seems so much like a fantasy that, even after conceiving it and planning it and getting on the train, I barely believe it’s a real thing one can do.

Picture spending a long weekend biking through the Dutch countryside when it’s absolutely blanketed in blooming tulip fields. You pause wherever you want along the route, maybe for a cappuccino at the seaside, or a family-farm-made gelato, or a thousand photos of hypersaturated blooms that nestle right up against the bike path. Horses and ducks wander over to see what you’re up to. Squat wooden windmills wave cheerily at you from a distance. 

Did you know they just let people do this? That anyone can just show up with a bicycle and a camera and spend a weekend chasing after botanical rainbows? 

My wonderful-awful idea was to stretch this fairytale goodness over the long Easter weekend 2022, taking my 34-year-old self and my 18-year-old Gary Fisher mountain bike on a self-planned tour through the tulips. (A wonderful idea!) After the long grey German winter, I wanted to spend ALL my time outside. I would haul my brand-new camping setup, which I’d bought in a fit of desperation during one Covid quarantine or another, and which I hadn’t yet managed to test in the field. As I sketched out my route, I decided it was not unreasonable to bike 120 kilometers on the first touring day. After all, I’d once done 70 kilometers in a day, so surely I could do 50 more…? (An awful idea!)

My route would start on the island of Texel, the first in a string of barrier islands shaped like Morse code that beep their way across the North Sea to Germany. From there I’d pedal south down the coast to Noordwijk, then dogleg inland through the famous Bollenstreek tulip region before ending in Amsterdam. I’d spend the first and third nights in the tent and the second in a hostel. That meant, in April, in a country nearly as rainy as England, I’d have just one night with a solid roof over my head and would otherwise be protected from the elements by either a baseball cap or a thin layer of nylon.

You’ll never guess what happened.

The sun was my constant co-pilot. I rode with the proverbial windows down (no jacket) and soon had sun-kissed cheeks. The quilted landscape of flowers absolutely glowed in the April light, each petal as resplendent as a fragment of stained glass in a cathedral’s mosaic. 

I was Dorothy swooping into Oz and watching the world flood with color. The path beneath my tires may not have been golden, and it was only paved with brick along a few unfortunate teeth-rattling stretches, but it did promise to take me to the wizard. And no, “the wizard” was not a euphemism for Amsterdam’s neurochemical delights. It would prove to be an experience far more technicolor and profound.

The chunks of color blurred into racing stripes as I whizzed by: maroon became gold became tangerine. The only tulip colors neither Mother Nature nor her human progeny have managed to create are blue and black, although a midnight-purple strain does masquerade as the latter. All the other 500,000 colors available to the human eye were laid out in an all-you-can-see buffet. I feasted on them like I’d starved all winter.

In a way I guess I had starved. Central German winters are a monochrome and misty affair, and so my winter escape is often to plan trips by perusing the colorful Internet. We humans think we’re pretty clever. We’ve invented cameras to capture sunlight filtering through freshly-spread petals. Some of us fancy ourselves wordsmiths and use high-falutin alphabetical arrangements to distill the joy of pedaling through tulip fields onto a page. However, these facsimiles usually fall short of reality. Maybe pink comes out slightly too mauve in photos, which only focus on one sliver of a landscape anyways. Or syllables can’t portray every facet of experience, no matter how many of them get stuffed into a travel essay. 

Yet where humans really drop the ball is in capturing scent, which can only really be preserved accurately within the folds of our grey matter. We recognize familiar scents when we smell them, but we mightily struggle to reproduce them, even within expensive soaps and designer perfumes that incorporate bits of the flowers themselves. When we peruse photos and words in our visual way, sometimes we forget that scent even exists at all. So while I’d diligently pored over the digital tulip delights available on the Internet, my nose had played dead.

This all meant that when I arrived in the state of North Holland, I’d been somewhat prepared for the beautiful but secentless tulips. However, I was absolutely not prepeared for the wave of fresh and spicy wave of perfume that washed over the bike path just a few kilometers into my route on Texel. My feet stopped pedaling of their own accord as my brain short-circuited, trying to place the scent. A field of a different flower finally coasted into view: diminutive lilac-and-cream-and-strawberry colored hyacinths! The scent mingled with fresh brine carried in from the sea. I filled my lungs and tried to press the scent deep into the folds of my mind to preserve it. As I write this, it lives there still, but I cannot share it with you, neither using our limited vocabulary for pleasant scents nor a scratch-and-sniff photograph. This, at least, is something you can only experience for yourself.

THE HYACINTHS. You’ll just have to imagine the scent.

I slowly recovered from this gobsmacking and continued on to my first-ever campground experience on this side of the pond. I’ve been a tent camper since I was an infant, but despite living in Europe on and off since 2015, I hadn’t yet camped here. I had no idea what to expect. Rolling in, I wondered if I’d accidentally booked a glampground. Flush (!) toilets, hot (!) showers, and indoor-outdoor kitchens with ovens and stoves (?!) were generously sprinkled throughout the campground. An unrestricted view into 15 of my closest neighbors’ tents and caravans was also an unavoidable quirk, as expected, since space is a much more precious commodity here than in the Americas. Strategic placement of my new tent’s door would be key…if only I could figure out where that was. A cloud of fresh-nylon scent billowed from the fabric as I unfurled it atop a squat dune. Maybe I should’ve set up this darn thing more than that one time inside my bedroom last year.

The more pressing question than whether my new Therm-A-Rest would hold air or my new shoulder-season sleeping bag would actually keep me warm in the rapidly cooling night was how much human noise I’d have to contend with. A permanent brick village called Den Hoorn loomed a few hundred meters away from our ephemeral nylon village, and both were packed with people. I needn’t have worried. After I’d shivered my way to and from the nearest heated toilet block and zipped myself into bed, quiet fell. Once again Mother Nature had worked her magic. Marsh birds sang as twilight descended and otherwise all was still, even the sea that was just out of sight, even the humans who were just a stone’s drop away. It’s unclear whether sleeping outdoors attracts a certain personality type or if fresh air just mellows us humans out, but that night sleeping in the dunes of Texel was one of the most peaceful I’ve had since my arrival on this continent.

(Left) ⮝ Den Hoorn on Texel, ⮜ My campsite, ⮟ A campground kitchen || (Right) ⮝ Waking up in my tent ⮟ A traditional Texel house

Just as well that I started with a restful night of sleep under my belt, because the second day would be my longest haul. My path from the tippy top of North Holland began on the dune paths along the Dutch coast, which are just about as fantastic as biking can be. Dedicated bike paths scroll among the towering dunes, occasionally intersecting with a dedicated equestrian or pedestrian path before they each dissolve back into the sea of sand. The route wiggled between the coast to the inland tulips and back. Every kilometer there was a pile of bicycles abandoned at a sandy trailhead whose path led up and over the nearest dune, headed for the pannenkoek-flat beach that stretches unbroken for a hundred kilometers. The wise Dutch have mastered many forms of aquatic engineering, and arguably their most sophisticated strategy is simply to leave the dunes alone, the better to keep the surging North Sea from reclaiming their country anytime soon. Meanwhile civilization is held captive in tiny pockets among these wilds. A single restaurant stands sentry at the end of each beach path, marking territory like the castles of old, but it’s clear that the sea and the reindeer and the wind are the only true royalty here.

The wind is so ubiquitous that the Dutch will often build two parallel bike paths: one that’s exposed to the wind, for instance along the ridge of a dyke where you can battle the wind in exchange for a sea view, and another that’s partially sheltered. I say partially sheltered because the only time you can’t feel any wind at all is during brief magical intervals where you’re headed in precisely the same direction as the fickle beast. Maybe the road curves in just the right direction or the weathervane squeaks a few degrees in your favor. Then all becomes quiet besides the sound of your tires chewing up the pavement. Movement becomes effortless. 120 kilometres seems like child’s play. Eventually the road curves back or the weathervane squeaks and the headwind – somehow it always feels like a headwind – comes screaming back. Even stark heading changes rarely do shit. A 90° turn will, at best, turn down the wind’s fury by a fraction of a percent. A 180° turn, which I had a lot of experience with since I would decide not to stop for a picture and then immediately think better of it, just meant all the hair that had escaped my ponytail would blow right across my face rather than to the left.

⮜ My loaded hog near the start of my path in Den Helder, ⮝ How trees grow in prevailing winds, ⮟ dune path, ⮞ wind route (in Zeeland)

Only 40 kilometers in, I was so exhausted by the headwinds that I just stopped at the nearest dune path. I locked my bike to the weathered wood but trusted my unsecured panniers to the good people of the Netherlands. My legs felt like jelly and I scrambled up the warm sand about as gracefully as an eel up a staircase. The seabreeze headbutted me again as soon as I crested the dune. Once I recovered and looked out, I was delighted to find that I had not accidentally chosen to visit a nudist beach (about 2:1 odds, in my anecdotal experience). I sank to the ground to devour a peanut-butter-and-jelly-and-sand snack amongst a tangle of wild beach roses. 

I remounted my hog (panniers still intact) and followed the path as it finally took a deep dive into the tulips. It’s immediately apparent that the modern Dutch like to color inside the lines: solid blocks of each tulip strain are contained within laser-straight boundaries all culminating in right angles. (This is in stark contrast to every single line and angle in the historic heart of Amsterdam, where the crooked buildings squeeze together like a bunch of old drunks on a too-small park bench). Of course, my favorites are the rebel flowers. All those happy accidents that buck the monochrome trend, whether it’s a single flower that displays multiple colors within itself or one that grows up among a block of an entirely different hue. There might be a buttery eye peeking out from a field of crimson. Wide orange blooms with too many petals can blaze with every color of a campfire. Cream tulips might be embellished with rust stripes that seem ineffably like real paint, complete with tiny brushstrokes. I was powerless to leave the last field. A pregnant purple-grey sky threatened to birth a thunderstorm over my head at any moment, but the wind swirled the blooms in such a way that I felt I’d fallen into a van Gogh. What was a bit of rain compared to that?

To bike in the Netherlands is to swoop over endless waterways that are used for every conceivable purpose: property boundaries and sheep fences and drainage and pleasurecraft highways. Some are piddly enough that I could have stepped across. Others are wider streets, reminiscent of a suburb’s network of avenues and culs-de-sac except they lead directly to everyone’s back yard. Only rarely do you hit a gargantuan shipping highway that can only be crossed by ferry (or seabed tunnel). 80 kilometers in and all bike paths ended abruptly at the river IJ, where I joined a swarm of cyclists and pedestrians and motorists and a farmer in a tractor who were all queuing at the top of the ramp to wait for the next departure. We surged aboard, we carless folk freeloading on this 5-minute government-subsidized ferry ride. Finally: a forced period of rest.

Two modes of existence are available for me when I’m on a bike. Mode A is the wide-eyed observer who can only travel for about two consecutive minutes before needing to stop for a quick snap or ogling of the scenery. As you can imagine, it takes forever to get anywhere in this mode, but someone has to sniff all the hyacinths. Mode B is the cyclist machine who wears horse blinders and struggles to travel slower than 20 kilometers an hour, let alone stop completely. There’s always a distinct break in photo timestamps that belies my downward slip from Mode A to B. The latter mode usually kicks in when I’m exhausted or the weather has turned or the late-afternoon shadows are growing long because I spent too much time lollygagging in Mode A. By the time I disembarked the IJ ferry, Mode B was fully engaged: I remember absolutely nothing of what happened between that moment and the moment I plunked myself on the Noordwijk beach to watch the sun set with a plate of mayo-drenched fries in one hand and an imported White Claw in the other. I can’t even piece together the story with pictures. As far as I’m concerned, that means I teleported that last leg. The important thing was that I’d made it.

⮜ Absolutely wrecked on the Noordwijk beach, ⮝ My hog at the beach, ⮞ Dedicated bike road in North Holland

Noordwijk’s beach hostel dorm was nice but I’d ached for the silence and solitude of my tent, so it was without a backward glance that I left for Amsterdam shortly after sunrise the next morning. The region between Noordwijk and Amsterdam is a tangle of tulip fields dubbed the Bollenstreek (“bulb region” in Dutch) that’s every day trippers’ dream. It was Easter Sunday. The crowds were raucous and giddy and I joined them with abandon. Dodging the tourists on bikes who were too busy rubbernecking at flowers to watch the road was just like being back on Mackinac Island during its annual Lilac Festival.

The Bollenstreek cranks up the tourism dial to the Disneyland setting. Keukenhof Garden is the relative Sleeping Beauty castle, but – it being Easter Sunday – I was SOL for getting an overpriced ticket into their meticulously manicured gardens. Instead I partook in every free or almost-free Bollenstreek activity I could find, especially those that didn’t involve sitting in a saddle, because my tuchus was sore from the day before. Tulip farmers in the Netherlands seem about as common as vintners in Bordeaux, meaning there’s a different family farm on nearly every block offering no shortage of entertainment. The charming little garden cafe at De Tulperij was my particular favorite, with tables overlooking hundreds of tiny square patches that housed all their proprietary flower strains, including one whose crimson heads rivaled the span of my hand.

⮜ People trespassing on the fields, ⮞ a headed tulip field

You’d think I would have been sick of flowers by the time I rolled into Amsterdam, but actually by then I was incurably infected by tulip fever. Only a few handfuls of the flowers were living in tiny pots around the city, a far cry from what the countryside had offered. So rather than hanging around a very crowded A’dam on my last day, like I’d intended, I went to do more biking in Flevoland. This pannenkoek-flat island-state literally lived at the bottom of the sea until the 1920s, when the Dutch decided they would resurrect it, settle almost half a million people on it, and fill up all the leftover space with tulips. My tires hit the Flevoland route and the rainbows hit my eyes, and I felt like I was home.

In the end, the wizard gave me the ruby shoes and told me I’d had a heart and a brain and courage all along. I suppose it’s why I was able to go on a 260-kilometer solo bike-touring camping trip based on a single wonderful, awful idea. I do wish FlixBus was rather less like a FlixBus and rather more like clicking my heels to get home, but magic has its limits. Even the magic of the ephemeral tulip fields that blanket the Netherlands only lasts for 8 short weeks a year. Then the bulbs roll over and go back to sleep, to await the spring sunshine once again.

So long, yellow brick road