Saturday Aug 24, 2024 To the boat

Our last breakfast at the Element Amsterdam and headed for Central station. We have gotten pretty good at using Google Maps and the transit system. And the buses, trams and metro all run like clockwork. The boat folks (De Nassau) let us leave our luggage on the boat, then back across the free ferry and found the tulip museum. Tulips actually originated in Turkey and somewhere along the way the Dutch decided they were going to grow all the tulips in the world. It is big ag with lots of big equipment planting and harvesting the tulip bulbs. The bulbs are what it’s all about, not so much the tulips, since they chop the flowers off to ensure bigger stronger bulbs.

We walked through the Saturday farmers market and picked up some food for lunch, and then back to the boat where we got checked in. A woman named Olga is our fearless leader. She is 67 and very athletic. She rides every day on the bikes and is a native of Holland. This is her 6th week in a row doing this and we saw her a few times a day checking in to make sure that nobody gets too lost or has any bike issues. She’s a lot of fun and the perfect person to do this job. 

We had three basic groups. Americans, which was us and a couple from Boulder, Colorado, the Canadians, which was a group of 4 siblings and their partners, and then the Germans and Dutch, which was the largest group. We got to know the Canadians over the weeks but not so much the Germans and Dutch, mostly due to the language thing. There were 60-65 people in all and I counted 56-58 bikes going out every day. A few people brought their own bikes but most of us used the Azor bikes which are good solid Netherland bikes. Ralph and Nancy decided not to get the e-bike version and the rest of us did. They are all identical with Shimano brand gears and electronics. We had no problems with the bikes all week. Nancy, who is fairly short, upgraded to a normal sized bike later in the week from the smaller one they fitted her with.