2002 Excerpt About the Dutch and their bicycles

While touring northern Holland, we moved to different inconvenient campgrounds and ultimately decided we should have stayed put in Gaasperplas on the south of Amsterdam, right on the Metro line. From there we could have gone everywhere we wanted to go—primarily Haarlem -- by public transit. The problems involved navigating some badly-marked roads, campgrounds in very inconvenient places and changing busses often. Here’s good advice. Never go on a trip like this until you have gone on a trip like this. You’ve got to know the territory for it to be trouble free.

Lets talk bicycling for a bit. The Dutch, like the Belgians and many French, use bicycles a lot. Every city has huge numbers of them standing around, especially at transportation stations. And every city here has bicycle lanes along every city street with their own separate traffic lights. Perhaps this dependence on bikes is responsible for there being very few fat Europeans. And there is a great deal of walking on the city streets as well. So people here get plenty of exercise in the course of daily existence. So one result of the high cost of fuel in combination with the flat land, is a great deal more exercise and much less obesity. This is something we envy.

There’s only one problem with all these bicycles. Often, when we’re walking on what in the U.S. would be a sidewalk, but here is a bicycle lane, we wander from side to side endangering ourselves and the cyclists. Although we hear the bell when we're being warned that someone is coming, it rarely registers. I have become Adelle Milavsky – menace to all bicycles! In fact, at one Amsterdam campground, we met bicycles, motor scooters and horses, all using the same "sidewalk" as we were.