Consider for a moment a lush, pastoral coastal floodplain (those of you from Washington might consider the Skagit Valley or Nisqually Delta). Fill the countryside with farms, fields full of cattle, sheep and horses. Toss in the occasional small town, all the homes and buildings made of brick. Now stretch this out over six hundred miles of winding country roads and secondary highways, and put water everywhere – an ocean, inland lakes, big rivers, islands, working canals filled with locks and spanned by many small bridges. In order to make your way through the countryside, add ferries, bridges at least 10 miles long connecting Danish islands (and to Sweden), 16-mile (and longer) dikes splitting the North Sea into calm navigable basins north of Amsterdam.<\/p>\n
This is the place I’ve ridden through over the last three days, and it has been heavenly. Everything is so lush and green in a way that is very reminiscent of the Pacific Northwest, yet uniquely European. From the cobblestone or brick paved streets of little Danish, German and Dutch towns to the ubiquitous bike paths – really everywhere: cities, small towns, 1.5 lane country roads, even the long dike – to thatched-roof country farmhouses that are directly connected at the rear of the house to the farm’s working barns, there is for me a most interesting sense of familiarity within otherness here. I find myself liking it a lot. Of course, this speaks to my love of western Washington and Oregon, with their similar green lush landscape, the islands and ferries and bridges, the smell of salt in the air.<\/p>\n
This land truly is defined and shaped by water. The farmlands seem incredibly fertile, certainly in some part resulting from periodic floods of the Elbe and its tributaries. The Dutch have their enormous inland seas and canals with small personal boats and freight barges, northern Germany has the mighty Elbe River and the\u00a0Nord-Ostsee-Kanal connecting the North and Baltic Seas, Denmark has 500 islands, many bridges and ferries and – like Amsterdam – working canals in the city. I found myself really enjoying Copenhagen, Groningen and now Amsterdam, my current location. To me there’s a magic to having waterways so integrated into the life of a city, boats next to cars and bicycles and scooters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Consider for a moment a lush, pastoral coastal floodplain (those of you from Washington might consider the Skagit Valley or Nisqually Delta). Fill the countryside with farms, fields full of cattle, sheep and horses. Toss in the occasional small town, all the homes and buildings made of brick. Now stretch this out over six hundred […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":220,"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions\/220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/updegrave.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}