Sunday 28 March 2010

A nice Sunday bike ride

Today was the Sinnerclub ride in Groningen (more photos here). Peter and I decided to go and join in, at least for a bit. The ride started in a village called Eenum, which was a 58 km ride from Assen. When we got there we found about 15 people (I didn't count heads) just about to leave for their own 60 km ride.

We only stayed with the group for a short distance as we'd decided to ride past the Sinner HQ in Garsthuizen and visit Jan and Harma de Vries who run the company.


Jan Eggens made a video of the ride, which without us continued up to the North coast of the Netherlands.

It was a great ride. Through lots of tiny villages, many with huge churches, past lots of windmills, over lots of bridges.
This is the "Peertil" bridge. Jan warned us not to take this route as the bridges were not entirely velomobile compatible, but we mis-read the map and ended up here anyway. Most bridges on cycle paths are no trouble at all, but this one is an historical monument, originally built in 1754, and still resembling the original design. It pre-dates velomobiles. The name is a corruption of "Horse Bridge" - and it was originally built to allow horses over the canal while boats went underneath. We used it to test our parking brakes.

Anyway, I took other photos, but none particularly worth seeing. The ride was great fun, by the time we were home we'd covered just over 130 km in a total of 5 hours riding, not all of it very quickly - such obstacles as these bridges took some getting around, as did heading back to Assen into a 30 km/h headwind.

Overall, a very pleasant way of rounding up the national recumbent weekend.
Read my review of the Sinner Mango Velomobile.

2 comments:

J.. said...

Did I recognise Noordpolderzijl there halfway through the video?

The "Zijlhoes" is still in business I guess. How was the coffee?

David Hembrow said...

J.. That's where the Sinnertocht went. However, Peter and I didn't go further than Garsthuizen, so I can't comment on the coffee.