We arrived off the boat at 6am. Full of a nasty head cold. The first day was to Braintree to see my first cousin once removed (Charles Mason) and his wife Harsha. It was a nice start to the ride, little lane ways and quiet roads, at least once we were away from the main heavy traffic from the boat.

One of the first stops was for coffee, and, my personal favourite, clotted cream and jam. A perfect start to the day. I’m going to have to see if I can source clotted cream in New Zealand.

Anyway – onwards towards Braintree, and to the scary part of the day – and possibly of the trip. So, the method for navigating was to go to Google, put in points A and B, and then tell it to take you there by bike. Now, Google routed us along the A12. I knew that A roads are main roads (one below motorways), but I thought Google would have better sense. The A12 is like a motorway, in that it has a lot of fast moving heavy traffic, but it is worse than a motorway, in that it doesn’t have a hard shoulder. Dutifully following Google’s instructions (we’ve given our navigation voice a persona – Betty), Betty brought us down onto the A12, and I trusted her. Maaike had better sense and after about 500m on the A12 told me in no uncertain terms that we were getting off this road NOW. Good call. We walked down the A12 for about 2km until we found a field that we were able to exit through and get back onto a sane road. Since then, I get Google to give us the basic route, and then take a close look to see if there are smaller routes / better alternatives.

Made it to Braintree, and had a lovely evening with Charles & Harsha. Charles does a lot of cycling and gave us excellent route information for getting to London.

For the trip to London, we hardly saw cars as we were on disused railway lines and canals for most of the way, far nicer than that awful A12 business. We did stop at a pub (the Black Bull), and I must say, Maaike and I were both very disappointed in the level of service. I think we’re just completely spoiled in NZ where there is a really excellent service culture. The owners were pretty grumpy, the filter coffee watery, and they didn’t even hold the heavy double doors while I was carrying the coffee out. I dunno, it sounds trivial or that I’m spoiled, and maybe I am, but in NZ it really feels that wherever you’re stopping the people are generally pleased to see you and happy to help.

Anyway, ra ra ra, on to London, down alongside the canals of the Lee Valley and in to Hackney central where my cousin Thomas lives. We were able to get about 2km from Thomas before we had to venture onto actual roads. I was surprised and happy to see how far you can get in London on these sneaky cycle routes.

When we got to Thomas’ flat I was a little nervous of where we’d put the bike, even though he said he had somewhere for it! In the event, we did shuffle it into the bike room and it fit perfectly. Very happy to be in Hackney and see Thomas again. Perfect.

We ditched the bike at Femke’s, went back to Posterholt for a family party (by train) and then returned to Herwijnen to continue our cycle. Basically it was 132km or something from Femke to Posterholt and I was keen to preserve the integrity of my posterior.

It was a lovely ride actually. Biking in The Netherlands really is such a pleasure. Their separated bike lanes really make life a pleasure.

It took us past the container port at Rotterdam. We went in a massive tunnel – the Beneluxtunnel, but nicely separated from the cars (so the air was clean).

Finally the boat was in sight, and time for beer and a Frikandel. This gourmet food is “like a minced-meat hot-dog” and is a thing of unrivalled tastiness.

Getting on the boat was fine, they had racks to tie the bike up against. The room was very clean, the shower hot. Unfortunately we didn’t turn off the A/C and it gave us both nasty colds. I’m writing this 10 days after the boat trip and still can’t hear out my right ear due to congestion! Still, a very nice cycle. Biking really is such a lovely way to see a country. You really get quite a different feel for the place than you do whizzing by in a car.

So Brexit happened. That is, Britain had a referendum and by 52% to 48% voted to leave the EU. It was an odd thing to wake up to. The markets went a little down, the pound lost a little on the foreign exchanges, but has made most of it up again.

It seems like the leave side was campaigning on a platform of “making Britain great again” (smacks of Trumps idea to make America “great” again). Taking the borders back and keeping immigration down. What it’ll mean for UK workers abroad, or the current workers who are legally working in the UK at the moment I have no idea. Will the city of london move some of their business out into Dublin/Frankfurt/Amsterdam ? A lot of unknowns. Will it ultimately DOOM! the EU? I have no idea.

It’s funny, my family originally came from England, though I was born in Ireland, and consider myself Irish. But I like to think of myself as European too. Do I think of myself more Irish than European? I dunno, honestly probably. But I feel strongly that having Europe around has been great. Travel is easier, ability to work wherever is nice. Maybe it has benefited Germany a bit more than others, as they’re exports are artificially cheaper than they ought to be, but it feels more outward looking and inclusive to be part of Europe, rather than to go back to a lot of little states.

Hey ho. It’s a funny old world. I feel that we have a lot of challenges ahead of us as the Human Race. 7.4 billion of us on the planet. CO2 going up and up – as this chart below from NASA shows.

We are heading into uncharted waters. I dunno, I’m definitely on the DOOM! end of the scale, but it seems to me that Climate Change & 7.4 Billion people is going to be a lot of stresses on our planet. Crop yields may change / have to move, quite likely. Then the other extremely interesting thing that’s coming along is AI & Automation. You probably haven’t seen it – but here is a wonderful video we watched a while ago in Resolve Digital at one of our learning lunches. Called Sandi Metz tells your future, it’s given by Sandi, and she gives a history of the evolution of printing mainly. You see how there were step changes along the way, where entire swathes of people were made redundant overnight. Like here in the BBC article entitled “Foxconn replaces ‘60,000 factory workers with robots'”. How is society going to cope with the massively reduced need for certain types of workers. If you don’t have the skills that are needed what’s going to happen to you? Will we have a Universal Basic Income to help a bit? Will there be a job as a taxi driver within 10 years – or will it all be automated self driving cars?

I have no idea. I really have no idea. I don’t know how we get from where we are, living pretty energy intensive lives to a less energy intensive one. How do you get there when it means that people will probably have to lead less comfortable lives for a while. What right do we have to tell other countries that they have to pollute less, when we’re simply further along the technology curve and have already done all our polluting to allow us to get to where we are? How do you get an electorate to vote in measures which will mean they’re life will get more expensive / less comfortable? What if my country does it, but yours doesn’t and keeps on polluting. And what if climate change will mean actually things might even end up better for me (melting snow so that I can get at resources previously locked away) so I might not even want to change anything?

So yes, lots to think about. I don’t have the answers, please leave a comment if you do ;)

Some pictures from Brexit. It is horrible to see the level of overt racism go up, even a little. Friends here in London have said some of their friends have experienced insults on the street since Brexit.

We flew into Eindhoven with Ryanair. Miraculously the tandem had arrived and looked relatively unscathed. Maaike’s parents had borrowed a friends trailer, and the tandem fitted perfectly into it.

Skipped on back to Posterholt, where Maaike’s parents live, and hung out for a few days, eating lots of yummy food (they’re great cooks), planning a little for our “party” later on in August (not a wedding mind, just a party ;) , eating ice-creams. Good times. Walking around the area, you can see how saturated the ground is, and how full the dykes are. Europe has been having a lot of rain of late.

So, we put the tandem back together again, everything seemed to work. The plan was to take it for a spin to Venlo, a town about 40km North, and then get a train the rest of the way to Nijmegen. So we biked to Venlo and my posterior was ready enough to call it quits for the day. Unfortunately we found out that they only take folding tandems on trains!?!? .. leaving us with a further 60km to bike to Nijmegen.

Stayed the night at Sjoerds (Maaike’s brother), then on to Herwijnen to see Femke.

We then opted to leave the tandem there for a few days, back to Posterholt by train for a family gathering, and then returned by train to Femke’s (Maaike’s sister) to continue on our Epic Bike Ride to Ireland.

Biking in the Netherlands really is wonderful. The separated cycleways are a joy to bike on.. it’s also extremely flat so you can fairly motor along. I was pretty happy with the tactic for navigating.

1. Go to google maps & find the route you want to take between A and B (choose the little cycling icon to make sure it’s optimizing for biking – more to come on this in a subsequent post, Google doesn’t always get it right
2. Take the URL for your directions, and paste it into the url box on GPSVisualizer.com, which will then spit back a GPX file
3. Import said GPX file into the wonderful OSMAND+ app on your phone. The easiest way to do this is to put it into a synced dropbox folder and then double click on the gpx, OSMAND+ will then ask you do you want to import it
4. Finally, choose the GPX file from within the settings in OSMAND+ and tell it to use the displayed track for navigation.

It really works very nicely. Certainly having GPS helps a lot, as some of the turns can be quite hard to spot. You have to get used to the navigation saying things like “turn left, then in 20m turn right”, when they really mean “go straight over the roundabout”, but, you get the idea.

After the US we flew to Ireland. Arrived into the usual grey sky. For the following 10 days everyone told us how beautiful the weather had been, right up until we arrived ;) Ahhh well.

It was lovely being back in Dublin and seeing family. Everyone was looking well and in good health. It can be quite jarring when you come back after a few years and especially parents have become older. Maaike and I went for a few walks, up to the lead chimney, and my first (I think) wander past the “rath” of “Rathmichael”. A rath was a Celtic fort.

Games of scrabble were played, we had a family party with cousins. I also had a most fun game of bridge with dad (partnering me) and an old (89 years old) friend Raine whom I used to play bridge with when I last lived in Ireland. I do miss playing that game. Dad and I even came out on top, quite satisfactory!

We also had a party to celebrate Helene (my brother Matt’s wife) getting her MD (a sort of PhD for doctors). The string of letters after her name goes on for quite a while! Congratulations to her, massive amount of hard work and effort! And yes, I did make some Dr. Dr. jokes. Oh, we also were at Matts when Ireland was having it’s “street party” day. Really good turn out on the street, what a wonderful idea. I think NZ does the same but I’m not quite sure. It’s certainly not countrywide on a specific day, not that I know of anyway.

Finally, a quick catch up with Domhnall who was in town for a conference. Funnily enough, Declan was also in town too – so Domhnall organised a reunion for climbers, and it was a really really lovely evening. So many friendly faces, it’s amazing how quickly the real conversations flow in Ireland.

Finally, it was time to pack up in Ireland and head to The Netherlands. My brother Chris very kindly offered us his tandem to bike back from NL to Ireland on. We had planned on buying second hand tour bikes, but the offer of the tandem was too good to pass up.

We butchered a couple of bike boxes into a frankenbox, brought it to Dublin airport and hoped that they’d accept it. They did. Technically a tandem is well outside the size limits, but we got through. Did seem somewhat chancy whether you would be accepted or not. Don’t forget the 60 Euro charge for sporting equipment either.