Trippin' with Susan Straley

We had another good-weather day for our last ride on our Bike and Sail the Tulips trip.  We rode to Zaanse Schans and back to Amsterdam in a loop. We started out our day with a quick Ferry ride to North Amsterdam.   The ride was lovely.  Riding in a group, I don't have the liberty to stop when I want to take a picture.   Using your phone while riding is against the law and heavily enforced here.  It will cost 150 Euro.   So, when I saw the cube houses on stilts built over the canal, and when I saw the house decorated with wooden shoes, I didn't take pictures.  We pedalled right on by.  Steve and I discussed that it might be better to be on a tour with less miles and more time to stop. Sometimes we biked on paths through flat grassy lands, sometimes through narrow streets lined with brick homes built adjacent to the sidewalk without front yards.   We stopped and parked our bikes at a museum with lots of 15th and 16th centur...

Greetings from the shade of my kitchen in Inverness, Florida, In two weeks Steve and I are flying to NY to watch the solar eclipse and visit his family.  This weekend they got seven inches of snow!   I can't remember if I purged my winter boots when I was cleaning out my storage or if they are stored up in Steve's attic.  I guess I will have to do some searching before I buy a pair.  We might even do some skiing or snow showing in the Adirondacs while we are there! As you can tell from the title of this post, we made it home from our bicycle ride.  I apologize to Steve, as I did not spend a lot of time planning this trip, I guess. And our motels turned out to be a lot further apart than I had expected.  We didn't always follow the Google path.  So we had three days in a row of higher than planned days.  50-ish.  And me on a new-to-me bike seat.  Let's just say, the pain made me wonder at times why I ever thought this would be fun. S...

 Greeting from Lake Mary, Florida, Last night after I wrote to you, Steve and I walked the side walk and trail to the Honeysuckle.  There we ate dinner.  Bruce will be glad to know we broke our streak of bad luck picking places to dine.  This was yummy.  With spicey green beans, cornbread, black-eyed peas, steamed cabbage, and sweet potato tots for me and catfish and cheezy grits for Steve,   home style southern cooking. When we arrived back at the B&B it was all lit up.  Nice! I use Google maps with the bicycle level turned on to map our rides.  Most the time the routing is spot on.  But I had a hunch when we got to the end of the Spring To Spring Trail, that it was putting us on the road when it didn't need to.  But that was later in the day, let me start from the beginning.  We departed shortly after sunrise. It was a cold morning but by 9 am we were starting to peel off a layer. We encountered a group of cyclists doing ...