Tam On Transit

One word for the awesomeness of this day: multimodal. Heck yes, dear reader, we used several types of transportation in one day!  We rode our countryside bikes to the train station.  We took the Stoptrein train to (somewhere), which honestly felt more like a light rail train. We transferred in a mere 6 minutes  to our train to Utrecht.  We hauled our luggage about a half mile, a good portion of which went through a very well designed mall, to our StayOkay hostel in central Utrecht. Then we met Ronald, who took us on a walking tour to pick up our in-city rental bikes. Y'all. Y'ALL. I was tired but also geeking out over how seamless it was!  But wait! There's more! We repeated a prior assignment from Copenhagen, Denmark in the new-to-us context of Utrecht, Netherlands. We followed locals on their commutes for about an hour before meeting in Wilhelmina Park to debrief. The experience was very different than anywh...

We headed out of the EuroParc to meet in the immediately adjacent tiny town of Linden with Sjors van Duren. He works for Royal Haskoning DHV on a regional network of bikeways between towns. This network has had many campaign names. It's been called a bike super highway, a bike highway, and finally, simply, Keep On Going. Sjors took us on a bike path tour, explaining the communication side of planning--aka the politics. Something Connie had mentioned too in Odense, though different set of things in this context of multiple municipalities. Many of the topics discussed boiled down to communication and power. For example, we crossed a terrible highway crossing. It's not great for people walking, biking, or even driving to try to cross this road. It's particularly bad for walking or biking as it's an important thruway for freight trucks. As in the US, freight/shipping groups have a lot of influence--aka power. The planners couldn't afford to build a bridge or...

Floris (and Ben and Adam), our local guide who has been with us the whole trip, had us bring our bikes to the Austin Adventures yellow vans the night before we left Odense. In ye olden days, it'd have been a couple of carts and some draft animals hoofin' it from Denmark through Germany to the Netherlands. (Okay, okay, boundaries were different back then. You get the point though.) In our present day, these were our trusty yellow beasts to carry us and our bikes to Nijmegen, Netherlands. These were my travel bags as I brought them for stowaway in the luggage van (which was not yellow). When I need to have a carry on and personal item, I can either stuff the gray duffel in the backpack and carry my laptop bag or stuff the laptop bag in the backpack and carry my duffel bag. It's super convenient to have the smaller laptop bag (sans laptop) when I'm out and about (or in a yellow van caravan). We took vans because it's ostensibly faster than the t...