Fair Weather Bikers

I was up fairly early and had a very nice full English breakfast. By the time I'd finsihed my breakfast Nig was surfacing. He decided to skip breakfast so was slowly packed the bikes - there was no real rush; we had around 200 miles to ride, but it was mainly motorways so would be quite fast.

We set off at around 10am. After a brief period on nice twisties away from the Nurburgring, we were onto the autobahn. We made very good progress and in what seemed very little time we were in Holland.

Traffic was quite heavy in places, and other road users were somewhat aggressive. There was one in particular who cut Nig up as he was about to overtake him. Nig backed off, and then shot up the inside to get back behind me. The car took exception to this and tried to undertake Nig again, so I moved over and stopped him, at this point he was along side Nig. Nig looked over and he looked to have a police uniform on and was shouting abuse at Nig who just ignore him!

Nothing else of any note happened for the rest of the journey until we got to Amsterdam, other than spotting vans with amusing slogans on the side. Amsterdam is a bit of a nightmare to ride around. It is confusing junction after confusing junction. There is a wide variety of traffic; cars, vans, bicycles, and trams, and it comes at you from every direction. Our hotel was in the middle of a maze of one way streets, even with the GPS it took a couple of laps to get there, I honestly don't think we'd have stood a chance without one.

We parked outside our hotel in a parking space and were about to check in when somebody came out and told us we'd get a parking ticket unless we parked out bikes on the pavement! We moved the bikes up onto the pavement against the hotel and checked in.

The owner of the hotel had a Suzuki Hayabusa, and he was just leaving as we were unloading. He told us we could lock our bikes to the hooks provided, I replied that we didn't have locks. He said, "Really? In Amsterdam? Are you sure?". At which point I started to get very worried. Since entering Germany we'd been told by various people what a dodgy place Amsterdam is, especially for bike theft. This comment didn't do my confidence in leaving the bikes overnight any good at all!

The owner obviously saw the worried look and said "It's not a bad area here though - you'll probably be alright." Well we didn't have much choice so we unloaded the bikes and went to our room.

The hotel, Hotel Asterisk, was cheap for Amsterdam (35 euros each). I'd booked us into the cheapest rooms, so ours was quite small and we had to share a bathroom with other rooms, but it was clean and comfortable and that was all we wanted. We were a little way from the centre - maybe a mile walk from Dam Square.

We had a shower each and then walked into the centre. I decided to let Nig have a go at navigating so gave him the map and he took us on a very scenic route to the centre! We had a couple of coffees and beers and tried to chill out. Unfortunately as the evening set in we found we couldn't relax as we were both very paranoid about the bikes, so we decided to have a walk back to the hotel and check up on them. This was no small decision, especially for me and Nig who don't particularly like walking, so it should emphasise just how paranoid we were!

It was the right decision though as when we got to the hotel it was very clear that we were in a very quiet, quite well to do area of Amsterdam, and we felt a lot more comfortable leaving the bikes. We returned to the centre and started to properly chill-out.

Amsterdam was a fantastic end to our tour. We had some nice food, good coffees, and saw some wonderful sights. Amsterdam is ideal for unwinding - though it does involve a lot of walking so my feet were killing me by the end of the night.

We had a very nice chilled-out night, returned to the hotel and slept like babies - all be it babies who snore loud enough to wake the dead.