Steamrolling Amsterdam on a Budget

In my daydreams leading up to my arrival in Germany, I envisioned my trips on the famed, mostly speed limit-less Autobahn to be motor revving, high speed, glamorous rides in a beautifully engineered German automobile. I hoped that renting a car and driving to Amsterdam would help me realize these dreams; my fantasies, however, remained as such. While the motor in our fun-sized French hatchback did rev, it did so at shamefully low speeds. The comfortable maximum was 130 kph (about 80 mph), so naturally I spent as much time flirting with 100 mph as possible (Mom, you didn’t just read that.) Nevertheless, driving on the Autobahn is a wonderful experience. The pavement is flawless, traffic is light and drivers understand how to use a two-lane system, making it a safe place to travel.

[Just to dispel some myths about the Autobahn that us Americans often have: it is not one road, it is the name of their interstate system, an extremely extensive network that connects the entire country. And there are speed limits on the Autobahn, mostly when in metropolitan areas, but out in the countryside you are free to drive as fast as you’d like. There is something so exhilarating about passing a policeman at 130 mph, then getting passed by an Audi or BMW driving upwards of 150 and the whole thing is legal.]

Six hours, 550 kilometers and one bizarre shopping trip later, we arrived in Holland’s most popular swamp, welcomed by cool, gray skies. We parked our car in a park and ride just outside the city center, pulled our disassembled fixed-gear bikes out of the trunk (both called ‘Surly Steamrollers,’ their name being eponymous to the title of the post), threw them together and took off. Although our two and a half days in the city were pretty rainy, Brant and I as fanatic cyclists fell in love. Take this as a reference point: Portland has the highest percentage of bicycle commuters of any city in the United States at about 8%. Amsterdam’s commuter percentage is 55%. There are seas of bikes that stretch city blocks and waves of bicyclists so large, their ebbs and flows dictate the flow of traffic and the energy level of the city. It’s really a sight to behold.

The cycling infrastructure in Amsterdam is so extensive and of such amazing quality that it deserves it’s own paragraph entirely. Anybody who has ridden a bike in an American urban setting has undoubtedly been honked at, been on a bike path that abruptly ends or been sucked onto some road, interstate or bridge that causes him or her to yell “#*@& bike riding!!!” These frustrations don't exist in Amsterdam. There are separate, bright red bike lanes on almost every street, both in downtown and in the suburbs around the city, there are special bike drawbridges over many of the city’s Venetian-like canals and when it comes time to dismount, there is almost never a shortage of places to park, including a number of humongous, multi-level bike garages which are entirely covered to keep your seat (and subsequently your hind quarters) nice and dry. When we came up to the first one, Brant and I had to just ride up and down it a couple times to make sure that it was real and not just some figment of our bike-crazy minds.

However, with every sweet there must be a bitter and Amsterdam’s bike scene is no exception. The bike lanes in the city are pedestrian-free zones, which is to say, pedestrians shouldn’t walk in them, lest they get mowed over by a caravan of bikes. However, bikes are not at the top of the food chain in these red lanes as Vespas are granted access as well. Even though they possess the ability to go as fast as a car at city-speeds, scooter drivers feel some need to buzz by, honking their stupid little horns and swerving between bikes and the side view mirrors of parked cars. I moved to the side to make room for the first few, but I quickly became hardened and bitter, much like a New Yorker on the subway. We took to chasing after them, yelling slanderous phrases in English which we can only hope they understood. Other than the inconsiderate scooters, riding in a heavily urban area is a pure adrenaline rush and was absolutely thrilling. Dodging in and out of moving traffic, skidding by masses of picture-snapping tourists, drafting behind supply vans and blasting through intersections on yellow are all ways to get your heart pounding and your lungs burning. In our two and a half days we probably rode just shy of 100 miles in and around Amsterdam, 90% of which I did without any brakes (Mom, you didn’t read that either). When I built up my latest bike, the brake from my old one didn’t fit, so we had to search to find one. In the meantime I wasn’t going to walk my beautiful new bike around, so I just rode it. Don’t’ think that I was going around with no ability to stop – I’m not that dumb. On a fixed gear you can naturally brake by pushing backward or locking up the back wheel in a skid, but neither is as effective as a good old brake. I have no idea how the thousands of stick thin hipsters all across the US on their brakeless fixies haven’t seriously injured themselves yet judging by all the close calls I had in just two days. When I finally found one were all but done riding in the city. Oops. At least my next rides will be safer.

The city of Amsterdam itself is very pretty, a web of canals peppered with private and commercial boats, most of which are still floating and some of which are dilapidating and sinking. Imagine a labyrinth where all the paths look oddly similar and the signs to tell you which canal or street is which are all misspelled. (This is me airing my frustrations with Dutch. As an English/German speaker, Dutch looks like a drunk Englishman and drunk German got together to create a new language. I can almost read it and half understand it when spoken, but I couldn’t help but feel like it it's similar to Pig Latin – you should be able to get it, but for some reason, you just can’t.) The buildings in the city are tall and narrow, often visibly leaning out over the streets, with façades so intensely detailed, it’s almost hard on your eyes to take in a whole row of them at once. The sum effect of the miniaturized buildings, picturesque canals and hundreds of bikers humming all about is a city that is too quaint for words. Also worth noting are all the colors used throughout the city. In a place with gray weather for many days out of the year, Brant and I supposed that brightly colored windows, lights, roofs and architectural accents were an effort to lighten the mood. Oftentimes the bright buildings were of a very modern design with beautiful wall-sized windows, creating an interesting contrast between the modernist new development and the more classic European style of the residential areas. And no trip to Amsterdam is complete without visits to the well known red-light district, which truth-be-told is quite disappointing (go to St. Pauli in Hamburg if you really want an exciting red-light experience…), and the numerous “coffeeshops.” Dutch “coffee” is only drinkable in smoke form and is sold in over 300 shops throughout the city. And once you figure out coffee was Dutch slang for marijuana, you have to figure out which coffeeshops sell more than just java. The special Amsterdamian shops have a green and white sticker discretely placed in the corner of the front window, slyly advertising what you could probably have already smelled as you strolled by. These shops, while not of my personal interest, provided perhaps some of the best people-watching of my life – business men share pipes with backpackers who sit next to groups of paranoid American teenagers who all buy their goods from the Dutch mother behind the counter. A web almost as tangled as the city itself.

Traveling through the city was all good and well, but there did come a time when we had to lock up our bikes and go to sleep. Not much was discussed in the way of nighttime accommodations before we got to the city and once there, the discussion was pretty short. Actually, it was more of a look that Brant and I exchanged with each other and we just knew: the car. We had paid to rent it, we had paid to park it, why not save and sleep in it? The first night when we had gotten sufficiently wet biking around we headed back to the Sloterdijk Park & Ride (which we later found out is pronounced Slooter-dyke – the subsequent source of many puerile jokes) and tried to prepare for bed as discretely as possible. This involved eating dinner out of the trunk, brushing our teeth using bottled mineral water as wash, and voiding ourselves in the bushes, all while people were wandering through the parking lot from the adjacent train station to pick up their cars and actually leave that miserable patch of asphalt we called home for two days. (We coolly wrote the leers off as jealousy for our ingenuity.) We had parked under the elevated train tracks so as to shield bikes from the rain. You see, we couldn’t put the bikes inside our clown car or else we wouldn’t have enough to lay the seats down. The stroke of genius came to Brant that we would lean them against the car and use our chain/U-lock combo to lock them to each other and the car door handle so that a would-be thief would wake us up when jostling the bikes.

All preparations complete, Hotel Sluter-Dick was open for the evening. We climbed in, leaned the seats back and rolled the windows on the bike side down to allow us to hear approaching bike thieves/police coming to kick us out. This led us to the discovery of our next problem: we hadn’t packed a single blanket or pillow. No worries, we’re tough. Our dirty clothes can be pillows and the bath towels can be blankets. We both fell asleep quite quickly, but our rest was anything but restful. I had strange dreams about people glaring at us pathetically huddled in our car and woke up in a couple fits of paranoia that our bikes were gone. Brant had the misfortune of being on the side of the car with the open windows, which permitted rain to blow in on him for several hours. He eventually mustered the energy to close the windows and the car then was nice and warm. One small oversight here, though: the car is tiny and there are two full sized men inside breathing deeply in their slumber. Our expectation was that uncomfortable sleeping arrangements would wake us up early and help us to get an early start to the day. Wrong. We woke up 12 hours after we had layed down to go to sleep, disoriented and heads pounding. My brain felt like it was operating at half speed; I just wanted to fall back to sleep. Brant looked like he had been roused from the dead, hair a mess and mouth agape. It clicked for us at about the same time: the car was hypoxic, another way of saying that the oxygen content of the air was lower than normal. We opened the doors and a rush of cool air blasted us in the face and it felt like coming out of hibernation. I still needed about 15 minutes of just breathing before I could be expected to accomplish anything requiring higher brain function, but we had figured out why we felt so sluggish and then we both felt slightly idiotic (and loopy) for the rest of the day.

Night two would be different, we promised ourselves. We got booted out of the pay area of the parking lot, so we moved 20 meters to the section that was free at night and set up Hotel SD for a second go around. The windows remained cracked the entire night as per an agreement we made with our brain cells, This night was quite a bit colder and for the second straight day we woke up feeling like we hadn’t really gone to sleep, but at least we didn’t fall into hypoxic comas. And who can argue with the nightly rate? We sure couldn’t. The third night was a bit different as our rental contact said we had to return our car in Würzburg by noon the next day. We were nervous that if we slept in Sloterdijk, we might wake up at 11 am and not have enough time to make the six-hour journey (another oversight we made was having brought no working time piece between the two of us, meaning there was no alarm clock to be spoken of) . So we set off at 9 pm with the plan to drive and sleep in cat-naps when we got tired. We made it about 150 kilometers to the first nap spot, and by we I mean I because Brant knocked out as soon as we hit cruising speed on the freeway. I woke up at 1 am, drove another 100 km, and then “fell asleep” at another rest stop to “wake up” at 6 am. We stopped in Cologne for breakfast, but at that point we were so dazed and in need of a shower that our visit lasted no longer than it took us to find a place to grab some coffee (German coffee, that is, which is actually coffee).

We trudged on to Würzburg only to get lost on the way to the rental lot and arrived 10 minutes after they closed, costing us another day’s worth on the car. Good thing we had saved so much by sleeping in the Renault, which probably took more years from our lives than we’d like to admit. Erich (Flo’s dad) showed up to give us a ride back to their house, but we decided to finish our trip the way it ought to be done, on our bikes. We gave him our back packs so that we could ride the 50 km with no weight, a choice that ended up benefitting us when the last 11 kilometers of the ride turned into a dead sprint to escape a thunderstorm which was bearing down on us. Upon arriving, we showered, ate and met our real beds with the most genuine relief you can imagine. It’s no surprise that I went sleep-walking that night after such a raw and aggressive four days, but that story is for another time.

Since Brant and I don’t get the chance to see each other all that often, our trip was a great chance to catch up and share in all the things that we like to do together (less falling into a low-oxygen stupor). We’ll always be able to look back on it as having been only the kind of tour you’d make while in your twenties – at least I hope that in another 20 years were not sleeping in cars and eating tomatoes and raisins for breakfast. :)