Day 1. Hoek van Holland to Egmond aan Zee contd.
This was however a much better start to the day than we had been expecting. We were not sure exactly where we were going to end up that night but I had suggested that somewhere between Heemskerk (eighty kilomertres) and Alkmaar (a hundred kilometres) would be a good place to be. Our spirits were up and with the good conditions it looked like we were going to end up at the high end of my estimates.
The dyke countryside took us most of the way to Scheveningen and Den Haag. In Scheveningen the route pops into the city for around ten kilometres. It made a nice change to be cycling through areas of the town with big detached villas. The downside was that we had to concentrate more with traffic lights, junctions and badly parked cars. A bit surprisingly we ended up going up and down a fair bit, and coming out of Den Haag, the river ended up around twenty metres below us.
After Den Haag and up to Katwijk we hit the first of the long sections through the sand dunes. Damae and I had done this section a couple of years ago but had both forgotten how lovely it was. The dunes were a lot deeper than I remembered and reminded us both of the Northern sections of the West Coast of Jutland in Denmark.
Cycling the dunes in Holland is like cycling through the Danish dunes except for one major difference. The standard bike path surface in many parts of the Netherlands is crushed seashells or hard packed grit. These are hard compact surfaces which are akin to cycling on tarmac with a new layer of grit on it. Thus unlike in Denmark we made reasonable time through the dunes; it was at times quite exhilarating on the downhill sections.
All good things come to an end and finally we arrived in Katwijk aan Zee. We popped out of the dunes onto a brick paved road, and then cycled up into the sea-front area. There we quickly selected a beach cafe and decided that it was now time for an early lunch. The sun was shining and the terrace was pretty empty in contrast to any other sunny day in season. Despite having brought sandwiches we all ordered some food and the compulsory coffee. The food was quite good, not too expensive and the view was lovely. We did not linger though as we knew we still had a lot of cycling to do before we could stop for the day. So after making use of the other important facilities at the cafe we unlocked our bikes and headed back up to the coast road.
The next section started by going through the rest of Katwijk and up to Noordwijk aan Zee. These together with Zandvoort, are among the most well developed tourist areas on the Dutch coast. The high rise hotels along the seafront are not especially pretty; this is not an example of environmentally sensitive development.
After a short stop to remove clothing as the early spring sun was now rather warm, we hit the dune landscape again and raced up towards Zandvoort. I remember these dunes as being a little more barren than the ones we went through before lunch. For some strange reason I found the latter part of this section hard going.