Veluwe - Day 3 : Resting?

Breakfast today consisted of 1,5 sandwich and "as many peanuts as you can eat". We had bought too little food yesterday. An employee of the campsite was surprised to find us camping where we were and said "down the road are nice places with electricity and water, this is just a barren field". When he saw us eating peanuts he said "when I was young I also ate peanuts when I had a hangover". I suspect he thought we picked our spot while being drunk, but apparently cycling has the same effect. I walked with him to the front office to pay. He talked some more but had such a strong accent I could barely understand. We only had to pay half fare because we hadn't camped on an official site. 

After the tents were dry we continued our trip. First, there was breakfast to be bought. The goal of today was to end up somewhere north of the Veluwe, a large natural area in the Netherlands. It was about 60 km away. In the local supermarket we bought bread and, of course, Ligas. Because we had taken a big detour yesterday we first had to backtrack 6 km. The villages we past were all connected by the same bicycling path, which we followed the entire morning. In a camping store we bought a new stove. During the afternoon we found a nice bench to eat, during which we again devoured an entire bread.

Bram thought the gas canister in his stove could be transferred from his old stove to the new one. It took the three of us 5 minutes to open the new stove and another 5 minutes to close it again. After greasing it up with some butter it went faster. We took turns opening and closing it to loosen it up. Then it was time to try exchanging the canister. We only had one turn and it needed to happen fast to prevent the canister from emptying. Of course that didn't work and by the time we changed the canister it was completely empty, the grass was frozen because of the gas, and we started to get a headache. We quickly continued cycling.

 

Near Deventer we wanted to cross a river. One hundred meter to the left was a railway bridge, but cyclist weren't allowed to cross. Two kilometers further to the left was a normal bridge that did allow cyclists. According to Koen we needed to turn... right. It wasn't a guess, because he brought a beautiful map, which showed there was no bridge that direction for another 40 km. After 5 km the road just ended and we were forced to turn around. We again cycled past the railroad bridge, then crossed the normal bridge, and passed the railroad bridge again because it lay in the direction we needed to go. It turned out we would have been able to cross the railroad bridge after all, so we had cycled 10 km for nothing. It was already getting late, but today we were lucky, for the first time our map showed a campsite nearby. Just 5 km further we already saw a sign saying the campsite was just 4.6 km away, but after a few kilometers more we saw another sign saying it was another 6 km. The area we were in only contained infinitely long completely straight roads. There were no forests only grass fields with some trees next to them. It was already 8 o'clock so we checked the map again. Fortunately, there was a helpful man who told us about a nearby campsite 10 km away. He knew the way and told us to just follow him.

With total disregard for the fact that we already cycled 85 km he raced his car with 25 km/h and we had to push out a final sprint which you wouldn't even see in the Tour de France. We all deserved the Green Jersey. We finally arrived at the campsite, which was also a farm. A friendly man told us it was completely full and so were all the nearby campsites. He did allow us to stay in his backyard for free. We were fine with that. Here is a picture of the really nice garden.