Last week's column....

Well, I rode a bike to the Netherlands.

That really hurt.

In total it took about 12 and a half hours on a somewhat creaky borrowed bike. I figure I covered almost 100 miles – maybe not a performance on par with our Tour de France riders, but they use more than one gear.

I got the idea for the ride a few weeks ago looking at a map of Germany. I noticed that my mother’s home town, Muenster, where I’m visiting family, is only about 60 kilometers from the border – a distance I’ve subjected myself to before and I figured I could do so again.

I’ve got a previous history of riding to other countries. While I was studying abroad in Freiburg, Germany, a couple of years ago I tallied up France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Austria and Liechtenstein. So I got a map of the stretch between here and the Dutch border and started planning.

One of the good things about German geography and public transportation is that there’s a train station in most small towns and the communities are close together. So if you get into trouble, perhaps the bike breaks, or you do, and can’t go on you’re never more than a few kilometers from a train station and a cheap ride home.

I borrowed the bike from family here – a three-speed ladies’ model with a goodly portion of creaks and chattering, but a pretty solid ride. Taking a few rides around town and the surrounding villages, I found I couldn’t actually shift into the lower gear, and using the high gear took a lot of energy, so I settled on sticking with the medium. Which was just right.

Muenster, and plenty of other places over here in Europe, have a well developed bicycle culture.

In the States bikes seem to come in two flavors – sturdy yet slower mountain bikes and faster yet more fragile road bikes. Here there’s a missing link for the masses who just want simple transportation – the city bike: skinnier tires and frame for nice long rides yet strong enough for curbs and cobble stones and cheap enough that it’s no major tragedy when some punk vandalizes it.

I’ll take a gander that here in this university town (around 50,000 students) they’re more bikes than cars on the roads. Taking a car into the city center is just asking for trouble on busy one-way streets looking for non-existent parking, but a bike can get you in and out even faster than the buses sometimes.

My bike on those long treks around Freiburg, named Freddy, was missing a few gears too. In addition, at times the brakes didn’t work, tires had no air, the handlebars were coming loose, the seat was cracked in half with staples coming up through it into me and some parts were literally held together with bailing wire.

So I’m used to making do with what I’ve got. Putting a few minutes and a little oil into the borrowed bike it started to shine up pretty well.

I got my gear together yesterday morning and got started towards the Netherlands.