Bike:Trip:Two, Ambition Strikes

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Um, so... 131 km/81.9 miles roundtrip, almost 14 hours. We didn't think it'd take that long, but the national park was great and we lost track of time. i'll post more about the trip when i've had a chance to rest. cheers.

jump here for flickr photos

UPDATE: THE STORY :910: biketrip2: we started late, around 1030 or so, because most of us had stayed up all night in the finest tradition of an international student house. originally we were five, myself, lavinia (from romania), jasper (dutch, my student manager), freddy (german), & pettik (turkish), but when only lavinia and i made it out of bed and onto our bikes. :) so off we went. the northern dutch countryside is beautiful. clean, well-kept fields, fat-short sheep, placid cows and little mini-canals running all over the place. our destination was a national park called lauwersmeer in the northwest on the border of the provinces groningen and friesland. the trip there was pretty idyllic; the weather was a perfect autumn day and we found a great balance between blindly exploring the bike paths (fietspaden) and knowing which way to go. once we arrived we rode around the bike paths for a couple of hours, exploring the wetlands and watching birds. i saw a lot of heron, geese, and huge cormorants. we then decided to eat at this little restaurant. i had a pannenkoeken, or dutch pancake, though it's the american pancake's much larger, thicker plate-sized brother. and then we noticed the sun going down. whoops. well, needless to say we got lost a bunch of times in the dark, went in circles twice, and finally found the right fietspadden to follow. a high note: got to see a bunch of meteors :D
we arrived safe and sore in groningen around 1130pm. a falafel met patat later and i crashed.