We decided to take our hosts up on their gracious offer of breakfast before departing; this resulted in a seemingly endless cavalcade of delicious food that lasted through lunch, filling our stomachs (and making it quite difficult to bike afterwards!) Here follows a faithful account of the gastronomic ginormosity jointly consumed by the Evan and Valkyrie Massive Food Consumption Team:
- 10 eggs;
- most of a loaf of bread;
- an entire plate of Speck;
- several cups of tea;
- two portions of Bear Loaf with Satésaus (a special of the café in town);
- half a hamburger;
- roughly half of a fair-sized container of fries;
- a container of multivitamin fruit juice;
- a couple of glasses of ice tea.
Tip for travellers: if you can't eat anymore, say so. You may find that the hospitality in certain areas exceeds even the size of a fully-stretched stomach :)
They also loaded up our lunch box with a variety of cookies and juices before we exchanged goodbyes, took some group shots for the road (check the Picasa albums!) and set out further into Noord-Holland. Despite our overfilled stomachs and late-afternoon start (about 3 pm by the time we truly got going), we managed a haul of roughly 80 km! The daily route wound through near-perfectly flat farmland to Groningen, where we briefly stopped to check the map. Valkyrie found a small town about 30 km out of Groningen towards Amsterdam by the name of Amerika, whereupon she insisted against all reason and logic that we must head there to camp. 30 increasingly late, cold, and exhausted kilometres later, we found ourselves instead in the nearby town of Steenbergen. We attempted to enlist local help in locating Amerika, only to find that it was apparently so minor as to escape popular notice. Frustrated and slightly lost, we headed for a nearby campground; however, this too met in failure when a sign to the site led us to an unsigned T-intersection. Whoops. In desperation, we approached the only house in sight, knocked on the door - "Hello? We're trying to get to the Ponderosa campground." "Ah, it's just up that way - but you don't really want to go there. It's not really for tent camping; people - how do you say? People without money go there to live. There's another campground up that way, maybe five or six kilometres...although it's getting late. Perhaps you would like to camp here?" We nod vigorously; 10 minutes later, we have our tent set up and are being treated to beer and wine over stories of our hosts' travels in Portugal, Italy, and elsewhere...so, in this part of the trip, we have been incredibly lucky!
Although I have nothing to offer our hosts, I hope someday to pass this favour onto others - the warmth of hospitality has all but disappeared in some places, replaced instead by a mortal fear that everyone is a serial axe-murdering arsonist thief kidnapper. It is easy to point fingers at the media, lower moral standards, higher crime rates, or other such excuses. It is infinitely harder to change this and welcome complete strangers into your home as these people have done; it is even harder yet to find areas (such as Noord-Holland) where such a reception is the norm rather than the exception. We can only hope to meet more such people during the rest of our travels!