Dutch Treats

It's another "great leap forward" for us--just not enough time to bike across Germany and Holland. While I wish we had more time to bike every inch of the way, looking out the train window for hours and seeing a largely flat, suburban and windy Germany (with beautiful bike paths), I'm a bit pleased that we can blow past the boring bits.

So we've arrived in Holland.




















And oh man, Amsterdam is the bicycle capital of the world.
















Four-story bicycle parking garages, filled to the brim.
















And World Cup street parties ringed by bikes 10 deep against every available vertical surface. The newest craze in Amsterdam bikes is kid carriers. Some fancy ones with a seat in front, a seat between the handlebars and the saddle and TWO rear seats. So you can sit three kids on at once, each with their own miniature handlebars and footpegs.

Speaking of the World Cup.

Can't escape it at all. On the train, they read the scores of the afternoon games in three languages over the loudspeaker. The America-Italy match was fun to watch on the giant screen in downtown Prague. Lots and lots of Americans there, so good enthusiasm, chanting, drunken stupidity, the usual. It's a bit funny to keep meeting Europeans who are sullenly proud of not being interested in football. The poor, suffering minority...

Lucky for me, Hannah's pretty into catching a bit of the games. It's hard to do, actually, only because so much of our day is spent traveling. Still, it's everywhere and the beer is flowing.

Personally, I don't feel I've seen enough to make a prediction--well, besides seeing Germany get stronger and stronger, but no surprise there.

Right now we're staying with my cousin, Vivienne, in the "family mansion." A big, beautiful old house in the city. Long since divided up into an apartment for my cousin, one for her mom and another for income. It overlooks a canal and borders a park, with grand sweeping staircases and tall stained-glass windows. Signs of bygone eras.

We also visited my other cousin, Jimmy, at the family business. Even got to borrow some genuine Amsterdam clunkers to cruise around the city. Finally, we had a sushi dinner with my great aunt Madeleine, who's eighty-eight and reads two newspapers a day. She knew all about our trip because she'd been following it on the blog, though she only learned to use the computer last year. Hi, Madeleine!

Tomorrow we bike past the windy sand dunes, down the coast to catch a ferry to England.