Winter Tour Number One 2011
The Tour Club Wageningen organises 3 mountain bike tours every winter for non-members and the first this year was today.The weather was perfect; cool without being cold, sunny, and dry without the ground being too loose. Their website said there was a choice of 30 and 50 kms, but in fact the longer route turned out to be 60 km. It was an excellent route, along many of my favourate tracks, and even better I discovered a couple of new ones. The photo on the left is going acrosss the Ginkelse Heide (heath), and instead of taking the way I normally do they cut across with a nice (and long) singletrack across the heath, ending in an incredible twisting and difficult bit through a sort of sunken passgeway (bomb craters, quarries?). So many people turned up* (or went the longer route) that by the time I got to the second break they had run out of coffee and soup, and indeed there were a lot of people around. Cycling through the woods you have impression there are only a few, but when I got to a level crossing and had to wait a minute for a train there were soon something like 50 people waiting with me. And on top of everything well organised and good signposting.
*520 - for more details (in Dutch) and photos see the club website