08.05.25 Day 2 - Zwartsluis-Stadskanaal. Wonderful morning, more varied lansscape, windy finish

A chilly morning (4 degrees), great sunrise and a quiet morning with relaxed cycling.

Sunrise on camping de Noorde

A work meeting on the middle of the day, combined with lunch, and then increasing wind (Northeast of course) and a more streneous finish. Maybe also because it was the second day? Made it a little shorter than originally planned.

After negotiating the small town Zwartsluis, the next town was Meppel, my place of birth actually. Left when I was three, so don't remember anything.

Crossing the canal Meppelerdiep

The bike lanes go through beautiful nature

Meppel harbour with old windmill

From here the route followed the main canal through the province of Drenthe, Drentsche Hoofdvaaart. This was dug in the 1760s to transport peat. Here I saw the remains of an interesting historical industry: lime kilns (kalkovens).

Kiln mills

You can wonder why they were built here. The reason was easy access to fuel, peat. Shells were tranported here from the sea. Originally these were built in the cities, but they were moved to the countryside because of the stench!

I find out that even though it is flat here, average speed is not very high. Why? Wind is one factor, but I use quite some time on finding my way. In Norway or Iceland, it it straight forward (almost literelly), but here there are many options. I like to use the Dutch Knooppunten ("nodes"). You can create your own route, or let the app propose one.

Example "Knooppunten"

The disadvantage of letting the app propose a route is that it often is 20-25% longer than Google Map's proposed bicycle route, which normally also is ok. So you have to compromise a bit on the way. Paper maps? would be nice, but I would need too many on this trip. I printed out some maps from Openstreetmap for the Baltics though, for there Google has no bicycle options. You can also use Openstreetmap for planning and routing. Suggestions welcome!

Statistics:

93km, total time 8:00, active time 5:43 which gives a moving average of 16.3km/h. 

Total 191km