Sunday May 22 to Gouda

A thunderstorm came through about dawn in delft, but by the time we got on the road it was just a very light rain, and not too cold. The route took us through a picture-book rural scene of sheep and dairy cattle on dedicated bike paths. The rain stopped and the sun tried to shine through, and before long we were riding without jackets or warm clothes- for the first time on the trip.

The second half of the day's ride was on a bike path parallel to a major highway and took us past a long stretch of prosperous office and industrial buildings.

Like all old Dutch town centers so far , Gouda (pronounced HOW-duh, while clearing your throat on the initial H) is a complicated warren of streets and canals but we found our way to the little B&B. By the time we showered and changed and headed out to look for a late lunch , it was raining again. That limited the afternoon's sightseeing but we saw a couple of things.

On the wall of the city hall is a plaque listing hundreds of Jewish residents of Gouda during World War II , with their names, ages and the concentration camp where they died. Ages range from 2 months to 85. One interesting sequence was an old man and his son and daughter-in-law who died at Gouda, and their children who died at concentration camps. Just imagine how that happened.

The city is very proud of its fifteenth-century municipal building which until the 1980s was used to weigh cheeses to determine the amount of tax the farmers owed. They still have an outdoor cheese market here on Thursdays.

Mexican for dinner- not bad

Reactions so far to Holland- people are tall , few beards or tattoos. Friendly, but on a bike they are solemn - no greetings or eye contact. They don't seem to have a national cuisine so the food is varied but in our experience uniformly excellent. Restaurant prices , adjusted for the Euro and lack of tipping are just about what we pay at home when we do go out. A large proportion of the buildings in the town centers were built in the seventeenth century. The streets and roads are built around the assumption that you are traveling by bicycle.