Days 13/14 - Drenthe

Not every town in Holland wins the Tidy Town Award, though most of them are good contenders.  The larger cities are diverse with complicated social structures and layers of history. Tourists pretty much take to the centers, where the old stuff is, vibrant town squares and outdoor cafes overlooking picturesque canals and brugs -- bridges monitored by a bruggewachter, bridge-keepers who take them up and down, continuously, for the daily drone of boat traffic. Some have tolls, €2-3, which the bruggewachter collects by swinging a small bag attached to a long poll out to the waiting boatman (usually a woman, the wife of the man steering the boat) who deposits the coins in the bag and sends it swinging back to the man (always a man) on the bridge. A well-choreographed canal-bridge dance.

Tiny tidy towns are fun to pass through. Big cities can be a challenge. Hoogeveen isn't exactly big, but it outsizes anything we've been through on our journey thus far, aside from Amsterdam. It's Sunday and the streets are swarming with people in sports gear wearing numbered flags on their chest. The closer to the city center we ride the greater the swell of people and activity. We round a bend to find a crowd of people lining the streets, looks of eager anticipation lighting up their faces, while a deep-barrelled man's voice booms over a loudspeaker. Music blares through the PA and on cue the excited onlookers start to wiggle and prance, dancing to the tunes while the tension builds. The baritone voice returns and begins a countdown: tien, negen, acht, zeven, zes, vijf, drie, twee (drumroll), één -- and POP! a gunshot and a host of runners break onto the scene amongst cheers and claps from the onlookers. The runners are not amateur athletes, as we've seen ambling through the streets, but what could be the amateur equivalent of paralympians, members of the community with a variety of disabilities. The crowd goes wild cheering them on.

It's a bit of Sunday fun in an otherwise uninspiring city. We weave through flavorless suburbs lined with identical housing or towering tenement buildings that look cramped and oppressive. Perhaps the homes of the many refugees and immigrants that come to Holland's cities in search of a better life.

Our B&B on the outskirts of Hollandscheveld (a village just east of Hoogeveen) is a lovely oasis from the bland urban sprawl. Most B&Bs are lovely, inspired by (mostly) women who love to decorate and create an "experience" -- an exceptional value to the sanitized uniformity of the more expensive hotels. Hettie, our host, a plus-size woman with a deep tan, plenty of make-up, and dressed in colourful and skimpy summer attire, keeps an immaculate garden and decorates her B&B cottage with butterflies and local art. It's a very copacetic setting.

 Henk (Johan's brother) and Margreet (Henk's partner) bicycle down to meet us. We last saw them in France four years ago, not long after they became a couple. They are fun and funny, quirky and warm-hearted people and we spend a delight-filled afternoon and evening in their lush backyard, snuggled in one of the many verdant forest landscapes of Drenthe. Though it's hardly noticeable, we've ascended to the part of Holland that is above sea level -- by roughly 10 metres. There is less water, but more trees. A tree-lover's delight.

We plan a picnic for the next day, a ride deep into one of the nearby forests. But my attempt to get in a couple hours of work before we play is stymied by my delinquent laptop, which has been growing more cantankerous and slow the past few weeks. After several attempts to administer the "how to make your computer run faster" suggestions, the computer freezes up and no attempts to shut-down-and-restart make it overcome whatever's bothering it.

We cycle into Hoogeveen to find some help at a local computer shop. Egged on by the locals' thumbs-down opinion of the city, the experience of cycling through the light industrial suburbs and then through the grubby central mall reaffirms for us that this is not a nice place to visit. And the computer guys are no help. And we're hungry (well past picnic-time. We both feel a grump coming on.

We give up on the computer situation and ride to Henk and Margreet's, arriving well after picnic lunch time. But these two are the hallmarks of the "let it be" life philosophy and, amazingly, are not miffed at all that their planned-for picnic now has to be altered. Three backpacks full of a novelty of foods -- all wrapped in various second-hand containers, including a cylinder marked "Vit C - 1000mg" filled with Jägermeister (a German digestif made with 56 herbs and spices -- delicious!) -- are brought forth onto the backyard table and we feast on a late-afternoon lunch in their beautiful garden. Later we take a walk through the nearby natuurlandschappen, an open area of moors surrounded by forests of birch and conifers.

Our time together has seemed too short. But by 9pm it's time to cycle the 10kms back to our B&B to get a good rest for our long ride south tomorrow.