The weather looked pretty good this morning, and we were envious at the sight of hundreds or thousands of people cycling on the island yesterday. Since our tandem is already packed for the trip home , we rented a tandem bike for the day. the bike , a Dutch Gazelle model, was a real tank compared to the bikes we are used to. But once it got going it had plenty of momentum and it did have one novel feature. instead of multiple gears it had a mechanism in the rear hub which gave it infinitely variable gearing with a twist of the handlebar grip. I have no idea how it worked but it made riding the short hills in the dunes great fun. We spent about 4 hours on the bike , including a coffee stop and lunch stop, and we had a great time. We rode to the north end of the island and back by a different route. After returned in the bike we drove down the eastern side of the island and stopped at one more harbor full of interesting boats. There were several old sailing cargo ships converted into charter vessels. They were larger than any Old Dutch boats we have seen elsewhere. One was 170 feet long. See picture. it is amazing how many old steel Dutch boats are still operating.
We were wrong about the weather. It spat rain all day. but we had great fun regardless.
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