On the road again...

So we have now left Amsterdam. We cruised up and down and all around Amsterdam on the bicycle. Totally amazing. The most efficient transportation system I have ever seen. Hats off to the urban planners in the Netherlands. They have it going on. Lots of trams, buses, really small cars and most of all BICYCLES! Bicycles like you've never seen. Thousands of bicycles. Millions actually. The Netherlands has a poulation of about 15 million people and somewhere around 19 million bicycles. Steve and I were both blown away. When we landed it was around -10C. That didn't stop anyone from bootin' around on the bikes. There's almost no parking downtown. Cars have to yield for pedestrians and cyclists, except at the traffic lights. But for a large part the downtown shops and busy streets are closed to cars. They were packed too. Amsterdam's population is about 1 million.
Other than that we checked out some of the finer things in Amsterdam like the coffeeshops and the infamous red light district. The attitude towards drugs is sooooo liberal. They were no shortage of coffeshops to purchase some of the finer Hasish and Buds from around the globe. As for the red light district. We walked up one way and had enough. We got offered every drug imaginable and some we couldn't imagine I'm sure. We seriously got offered drugs about 20 times in ten minutes. Sketchy.

So with that our fun was over and we decided to start riding. Steve's a little heavier than I am, but hey I'm the little guy. The first day we rode 40km's to Utrecht. Beautiful ride with the winds at our back. It rained off and on the whole day with a high of maybe 7C. We met a really nice fellow named Robert who invited us to his place for dinner and a nights rest but we settled for a warm beverage at the local pub because he lived the 30 minutes the wrong way. So we finished our ride into Utrecht after feeling lost for most of the day and we stayed at a hostel for the night. Utrecht is a really nice city. Picteresque, canals through the downtown and old buildings everywhere. 9 organic grocery stores in total.

This morning we ventured to S-Hertogenbosch around 60km's. It rained for most of the day but we had a serious wind behind us. We crossed the 3 largest rivers in Europe today. The Rhine, the Lek and the Maas. I think that's right. We saw a couple windmills and passed through some other small towns. Pretty much every town is beautiful beyond anything I've seen. Compounded by the fact there is almost no car traffic during the day or at rush hour in the downtowns. Seriously try to imagine Hamilton or Toronto with car free downtowns and tons of people flying around on bikes. Ahhhhhh.

So that's that. We're in Den Bosch now after a good cycle and strecch and we'll post again some other time hopefully with photos when we figure that out!