Bike

& Barge in Northern Europe

by David Lamb

I marvel at the tales of fortitude and endurance I read on these pages as cyclists take on moun-tains and deserts and the chal-lenge of the long, open road. But, truth be told, at age 70, I no longer can identify with the

riders, athough once, years ago, I biked alone across the U.S. So I start with a dis-claimer: this isn’t a real adventure story. It’s a story about how a gang of Social Security recipients head overseas every summer for a leisurely cycling holiday on a private tour we customize ourselves to take into account our age and abilities, our penchant for comfort, and our aversion to the no-pain no-gain philosophy.

That’s why I was on the piers of a small harbor in downtown Amsterdam on a breezy morning last June to greet 18 friends from the U.S. who had signed up for another escapade of what they call “Dave’s Dream Team.” A dozen barges that had been converted into passenger ships, each with about 10 cabins and bicycles on the deck, swayed in the water. I was looking for the vessel Sailing Home, which I had chartered for $29,327 for a week-long, 200-mile bike-and-barge trip from Amsterdam to Bruges, a medieval city in Belgium.

Before you gasp at the price — for 20 people, including my wife and me — it works out to $1,466 per passenger. Not bad for seven nights on a spiffy floating hotel, three meals a day, bicycle rentals, and a first-rate guide who rides every mile with you, knows the region’s history and the best cafés and pubs along the way, and can fix flats and cranky derailers in a flash.

My work as pro bono, self-appointed tour organizer of the Dream Team began when a large U.S. cycling company cancelled on short notice a tour of Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula that four of us had booked. On the Internet, I found a family-run cycling outfit in Killarney, Cycle Ireland, that let me personalize a tour. I had the call on daily mileage (about 30), terrain (hills okay, not mountains), quality of hotels/inns and restaurants (top notch), daily luggage trans-fers (essential), and length of tour (eight days, one afternoon off). Ciaran and Mary

O’Callahan came back with a reasonable quote and I emailed a bunch of friends: “Sandy and I have signed up for this pri-vate bike trip. Want to join?” 16 did.

On that trip, everyone knew Sandy and me; most didn’t know each other. The risk of incompatibility lurked. But, just a few miles down the road, it became apparent that a shared adventure, even a tame one, breeds a congenial cohesion. Several rid-ers who hadn’t cycled in years feared they couldn’t handle 30 miles. They were soon appeased. That’s the beauty of a bicycle. It rises to meet you at your level of ability.

Since then, we’ve biked France three times, the Cotswolds of England, Sweden, New Zealand, Holland, and the Danube River bike path from Passau Germany, to Vienna. For the last four years, the same 20 riders — the maximum I allow to keep the size of the group manageable — have made our rides and now it’s as though all were lifelong chums. “I block off the first week in June every January even if I don’t know where we’re going,” one of them said. The deal I’ve made with the Dream Team is that anyone who joins a tour gets an automatic invitation the next year. If they skip one, they go on a waiting list, which now stands at eight.

“You folks ready to get moving?” our Belgian captain, Willy Coupe, 58, asked after the last of our group had clambered aboard the Sailing Home, found the cof-feepot, and been sized for bikes — solid 24-speed, Shimano-geared Gazelles, manu-factured by a Dutch company that has pro-duced 13 million bicycles since its found-ing in 1892.

Amsterdam was soon behind us. We headed into Holland’s countryside, biking along canals and rivers lined with toiling windmills, through 16th-century villages with cathedrals and towering bell towers, everything green and flat and feeling so Dutch you expected to see people wearing wooden shoes. There were cyclists every-where: men in business suits pedaling to work; women with kids’ seats taking their children to school; and teenagers on dates. Not surprising, perhaps, considering that, with 17,000 miles of bike lanes and more bicycles than people, the Netherlands sure-ly rates as the world’s most bicycle-friendly country.

We passed into Belgium the third day and docked for the night in Ghent, Captain Coupe’s hometown, just behind the house-boat on which he lives. His family came aboard for dinner and drinks. Coupe has been hauling cargo and passengers over Europe’s waterways since he went to work as a teenager on his parents’ barge 40 years ago. A friend recently tried to recruit him to pilot one of the large cruise ships that carry tourists on overnight routes like Budapest to Prague. The money was better, but he decided to stick with the cycling crowd.

“I just prefer to work in a family atmo-sphere, and that’s what you get when you take on a couple dozen bicyclists sharing a week on the water and the bike paths,” said Coupe, who helped set tables and dry dishes when he was moored. In the evening, the crew — guide, cook, and two mates — would gather in his wheel room, and the place would ripple with storytell-ing and laughter.

If the idea of putting together your own private tour sounds appealing, here are some suggestions. First, be selective in

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your invitations and leave the complainers, whiners, obsessive talkers, and dullards at home. Build into your itinerary plenty of time to smell the roses and dawdle in cafés and towns, castles and museums. At the end of the day, it’s the experience, not the speed or miles, that matters. Design a trip everyone can handle. You can keep both the serious cyclist and the faint of heart happy with two daily overlapping itineraries of, say, 25 and 50 miles. The tour company should be able to accomplish this by finding shortcuts that trim miles off the

longer route.The most essential element, of course, is

finding the right overseas tour. But where? There’s a bewildering array of them, from Armenia to Vietnam. Start your search at biketours.direct.com, an invaluable

resource that lists more than 150 routes in 27 countries. You’ll find detailed itinerar-ies for each tour, the daily mileage and terrain, and the cost and the dates they’re offered. You often have a choice of cycling on your own or having a guide. There’s also a special listing for bike-and-barge tours, a niche market for cyclists that started about 20 years ago and is now offered in Holland, Belgium, Germany, and France.

This was the second year our group chose a bike-and-barge tour, and we set off every morning on our bikes and caught

up with the boat in a different town every afternoon. This type of tour offers casual cyclists some distinct advantages over our earlier trips that carried us inn-to-inn over land. First, you only unpack and pack once during the week. Second, if you want time

off from pedaling, you can stay onboard while the vessel slips through canals, riv-ers, and locks en route to the night’s stop-over. And, the captain can drop you off at different places to make the day’s cycling distance longer or shorter.

The Sailing Home, 132 feet long and diesel powered, started its life in 1927, car-rying sand and stone. In 2000, as the bike-and-barge business grew, it was redesigned and rebuilt, with an attractive, wood-pan-eled restaurant and lounge and an outdoor sunning area on the top deck, and 14 cabins, each with private facilities, on the lower deck. In keeping with the family atmosphere, we poured our own cocktails and wine in the evening and marked an honor sheet with our purchases, to be paid at the end of the journey.

The sun didn’t set until nearly 10:00 PM, leaving us ample time after dinner to explore the towns and cities where we docked. In Gouda we bought rounds of the town’s famous cheese. In the Turkish quar-ter of Ghent, we found an Internet café to catch up on emails and baseball scores. All of us — nine couples and two singles — sauntered through Antwerpen’s infamous red light district, separated by only a few blocks from the city’s magnificent central plaza. I don’t think we asked a question that our Dutch guide couldn’t answer.

What level of support do you need on a private tour? It depends on the tour. In the Cotswolds, we had no guide. In New Zealand, Steven and Tania MacKay, the Christchurch couple who ran our tour, provided a van to carry us and our bikes over the Southern Alps and even served an elegant English-style tea along the side of the road each day. In Ireland we didn’t have a guide, but the company gave us detailed route maps every morning and offered

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Full-service SAG. Members of the group ride past their home away from wheels.

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a cell number to call if we had break-downs or problems. Generally, though, I don’t know anyone who regretted having a guide, and I’ve never known a guide who wasn’t helpful and sociable.

Our ace in the hole this year was Piet de Joode, who speaks five languages. He leads bike tours in the summer and teaches ice skating in the winter. “We’ll head to the forest; we’ll be drier there,” he said one afternoon after rain clouds that had toyed with us throughout the day cut loose with a deluge. He altered course, picked up a network of connecting trails, and four miles later we were under an umbrella of overhanging boughs. Armed with a GPS, he kept us off heavily traveled roads, knew obscure paved lanes that led us onward, swept the route at each turn to make sure we hadn’t lost anyone, and, most impor-tant, found the Sailing Home at the end of each day.

We almost felt betrayed the last night in Bruges when de Joode removed our name tags from the handlebars and began prepar-ing the bikes for a new group that would board the next day for the return trip to Amsterdam. It was as though Sailing Home had become our private retreat and no one had the right to trespass.

“Tell me truthfully, Piet,” one rider said, “aren’t you going to remember us as the best group you’ve ever had?” I had to agree with Bob. It was a spirited group that didn’t show its age. There wasn’t a deadbeat in the lot. I didn’t see a scowl or hear a growl all week.

“Bob,” de Joode answered with a wink, “by 2:00 PM tomorrow, when I’m taking the new group into Ghent, you’ll be erased from my memory and be gone forever.”

David Lamb is an eight-time Pulitzer Prize nominee who has traveled the world for 25 years as a Los Angeles Times correspondent and is the author of six books, including Over The Hills: A Midlife Escape Across America by Bicycle.

50U.S.

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ACROSS

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Sept 23 - 29, 201221st Annual “One Awesome Tour Bike Ride Across Nevada.” Fully supported multi-day tour across the Silver State on US Hwy 50 - America’s Loneliest Road, from the beauty of Lake Tahoe to the grandeur of the Great Basin National Park. Limited to 50 riders. A partial ride option may be available depending on rider signups and interest.

Sunday - June 3, 2012Stateline/Lake Tahoe, NV/CA - 21st Annual America’s Most Beautiful Bike Ride. This ride promotes Lake Tahoe Bikeway, the plan to build and interconnect bike lanes/trails around Lake Tahoe, and is the culmination of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's National Team In Training spring fund raising program. 3000 participants.

Sunday - Sept 9, 2012Lake Tahoe, NV - 10th Annual. Another opportunity to enjoy the end of summer and ride around Tahoe’s 72-mile shoreline. It will also offer our famous sightseeing Boat Cruise / 35-Mile Fun Ride. Limited to 2000 participants.

For More Info call  1-800-565-2704or go to bikethewest.com 

Sunday - June 24, 2012Genoa, NV - 5th Annual Tour of the beautiful Carson Valley and Barbecue & Ice Cream Social. 44-Mile, 20-Mile Bike & Hike & Family Fun Ride. Live music, BBQ & Ice Cream Social.

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At the helm. Captain Willy Coupe.