I had several posts that I wanted to make as soon as I got back from holland, but one of my last few days there i decided to go back to Utrecht and rescue my bicycle and bike back to Amsterdam. It's about 40km from the edge of Utrecht to the edge of Amsterdam, but I messed up in the beginning going north instead of northwest and missed all the main routes to amsterdam. This meant that there weren't signs to Amsterdam because no one would go to Amsterdam in the way I was going, so it was a bit of an adventure.

At one point I ran into this nifty purely rectangular lake. I thought, "it's a rectangle, that means the lake is manmade." And then, "Wait, it's Holland, it's the land that is manmade."

Then at some point I ended up going through a small town which only had one road and it was under construction. But since there's only one road everyone still used it. So it was dirt and full of enormous holes.

Anyway after going north for a while I realized I needed to turn a little west. So I tried that for a while. Then I decided to try going north again. There weren't any roads going north for a while, but then I found one. I went for about 10 minutes, then i looked to the left and saw that there was a giant body of water to my left. This worried me since at some point I would need to cross it. I looked at my map, tried to find what river it could be... Convinced myself that it wasn't the giant sea in the middle of holland, and kept going. About 5 more minutes there's a gap to the right and I see that there's a giant body of water there too. I stopped and realized that as far as I could see in pretty much all directions there was just water.

So I stopped at the one resteraunt nearby and asked for directions. Of course the waitress spoke perfect english and all was good. Turns out I was in Breukeleveen.

At any rate I had to go all the way around the massive lake... At this point it was windy and rain looked imminent. Finally after far too long I got to the outskirts of amsterdam. I had a slightly nervous ride through the government subsidized high rises at the south end of the city, and realized that the 40km was to the edge of Amsterdam and I still had a while.

FInally at 11pm I got to downtown amsterdam just in time for it to start pouring. So I locked my bike and caught a bus.

Anyway, the point is that after five and a half hours of bicycling with my hands on the handlebars I'd lost sensation in the fingertips of my little and ring fingers of each hand. So I wasn't allowed to type for a while. Hence my unfortunate lack of posting.