Vacation 2009: vechtdalroute / Vechtetalroute¶

Tags: personal, cycling

At the end of July/beginning of August we took a three-week cycling holiday: the vechtdalroute. That’s a cycling route along the river Vecht(e) which we followed from the end point (Zwolle, the Netherlands) to the origin in Darfeld, Germany. All in all, the route itself was 225km, but with some detours, shopping trips and generic touristy stuff, we cycled 430km.

“We” means Annie and me and our two kids, now aged 5 and 7. The oldest one cycled on her own. With luggage. Quite an achievement! The youngest one’s small bike was attached to my bike with a FollowMe coupling. Here’s a photo I made while cycling that shows our configuration. (Yes, that’s a steam tractor in the background…)

The weather was generally good. Two really rainy days and some rain now and then. But the temperature was good: much warmer than on our previous holiday. We went swimming four times, so that’s good.

The cycling route itself was nice and enjoyable. Some parts were more beautiful than others, of course. The river is a constant companion that keeps on getting smaller :-) Pretty funny to watch: where we started out, it is a 20 meter wide river where we swam in. At the end it is a small stream where you jump over.

The route is ideal when cycling with kids: following a river means you don’t have to climb a lot. Just a viaduct here and there. There’s one thing to watch out for: in the German part of the route, there aren’t a lot of camping sites. So some planning is in order to prevent overly long cycling days. But I’ll cover that in a separate blog post.