The road home

After riding past fields and fields of flowers early in our bike trip, on Friday our tour came full circle when we visited the famous Aalsmeer Flower Market, an astounding place where millions of flowers are brought to be inspected and auctioned off to buyers from all over the world every day of the year.

The flower showrooms stretch almost out of sight, with small trains made of carts full of flowers racing in every direction. Meanwhile, in a huge tiered room with about 400 computer stations, bidders watch intently and punch in their orders as flower samples are wheeled in and information about each lot is displayed on huge screens. I couldn’t help but be struck by the importance of flowers to the Dutch economy – and to people everywhere who crave their beauty enough to buy them.

Saturday the 18 members of our biking group said our good-byes a bit regretfully and headed in our separate directions – some home, some on to other destinations. Daryl and I wheeled our suitcases to the Amsterdam Centraal Station and boarded the train for Brussels, about a two-and-a-half hour trip. Here we’re staying in a small, older hotel called La Legende, on Rue du Lombard. Our room with double bed, compact by U.S. hotel standards, seems gigantic compared to the boat cabins.

We’re near the Gare Centrale and the Grand Place, with its amazing ring of Gothic architecture, and the streets are all a medieval jumble, thick with 21st-century tourists. Every nearby street and alley is full of sidewalk cafes, and the cafes full of people. One whole area seems dedicated to Moules (mussels) and Frites places, with pails full of empty shells at every table. This is considered the unofficial national dish of Belgium, but I’m sticking with the other standards – beer and chocolates.

As lively and interesting as Brussels is, it’s hard not to miss the bikes and the bike culture of Holland. On the train today I was thinking about our week of touring Holland on two wheels – and my friend Jan’s parting words to me: “May you find the renewal that comes on the seat of a bicycle.” After participating in dozens of bike trips, this is the first one where I wasn’t riding my own skinny-tired, dropped-handle bar road bike, but rather an upright touring bike with wide seat and handle bars. It glided easily over all terrains, coasting nicely even on the flats, and at our easy pace I was able to spend a lot of time soaking in the countryside dotted with windmills and the small towns with their lovely old houses and ubiquitous canals.

Spending a week mostly outdoors always revives my spirit, and seeing another country and another culture up close heightens my awareness of the richness that awaits us everywhere if we’re living with our eyes (and our minds) wide open – seeing everything, as Gramma Mary said, as if for the first or last time.