Cycling Guides to Holland

[steady eddy]

Has any body used Eric Van Der Horst's guide to cycling in the Netherlands, is it as good as people say it is, or am I better off with the Netherlands cycling atlas and working out my own routes? For next year we are thinking of either going south from Rotterdam and returning in a loop or coming up from Belgium. We are are open to alternatives for both mapping (not GPS please - I like the bigger picture) and routes if the more experienced of you can offer any.

[iviehoff]

Has any body used Eric Van Der Horst's guide to cycling in the Netherlands, is it as good as people say it is, or am I better off with the Netherlands cycling atlas and working out my own routes? For next year we are thinking of either going south from Rotterdam and returning in a loop or coming up from Belgium. We are are open to alternatives for both mapping (not GPS please - I like the bigger picture) and routes if the more experienced of you can offer any.

Having no idea of where might be nice to cycle in the Netherlands, or how to guess it from a map, I eventually found vdHorst's guide and it seemed to be the most useful option to help me design our first Netherlands tour. We did go off piste from time to time. He also managed to get us lost from time to time, and also took us counter intuitive ways, but I expect this is mainly to do with developments in the transport network, affecting both the time when he designed the routes, and the period since the guide was published in 2011: and there do seem to have been some major developments in quite a few places.

When we went off piste, I was quite able to use the Knoopunkt (numbered junction) system shown on cycling maps, supplemented with the red directional signposts when I couldn't see a Knoopunkt director, to follow a route, though it would be tricky finding your way in and out of cities. That was where Horst was particularly useful, giving you practical ways in and out of cities, though it also goes wrong when a new suburb is built or they completely redevelop the road system around a station - as they were doing in 2 cities I passed through. More complicated areas 1:50 000 maps are wise, else 1:100 000 OK, though the latter may not have all the camp sites - though someone showed me a 1:100 000 that had more campsites than the maps I had.

We are thinking about going again next year and will have a bit more confidence to go where we choose, though I will still have regard to what he recommends as particularly good cycling, as we didn't follow all his routes.

I don't think vdHorst has a route going south of Rotterdam. He provides only a small number of very specific routes which he calls the best of the Netherlands. This comprises the main loop around the Randstadt (Hoek - Hague - Haarlem - Zaandam - Amsterdam - Utrecht - Gouda - Delft - Hoek), another loop around the Ijssel Meer, a route going east from Utrecht to Nijmegen, and a route along the Scheldt barriers down the SW coast.

Were you by any chance thinking of going to the Tandem international rally which is in the area you mention next year?

[steady eddy]

Thank you for his - the guide has just been updated so may well resolve the issues you mention. I am always a bit wary of guides that have set routes as the writers idea of a good route may not always correspond with my own.
No we are not tandem riders

[foxyrider]

ANWB maps - they have the way points marked if you want to follow the advised routes and they have the location of bikes shops and accomodation marked on them. You can get them via Amazon at reasonable cost.

My biggest gripe is that they are double sided, flimsy and irregular sizes but the content is great.

[iviehoff]

It was ANWB 100 000 maps I was using when someone showed me another 100 000 cycling atlas that had rather more campsites on it, though ANWB do also do 50 000 maps. The description on Stanfords website notes that Falk 50 000 maps show more accommodation even than ANWB 50 000 maps. My experience was taht athe Falk 50 000 maps do show a lot of campsites, including ones that are hard to spot even when you are actually there. There is actually another series of 50 000 cycling mapes from De Sterkste which I have not seen an example of. I see that there is a cycling atlas 100 000 called Landlijke Fietsatlas from a fourth producer, as well as atlases from ANWB and Falk. What a lot of choice. Nevertheless, I never actually saw a shop selling any maps when I was in the Netherlands. Maybe if I had gone looking for big bookshops when I was in a large city I might have found it, but I never came across anything like that by chance, and small town bookshops I did see had no maps. In particular, I saw nothing resembling a shop that might sell a map on the High Street of Hoek van Holland, which is a small and distinctly low income town, mainly specialising in cheap eateries selling fried food. Even the evidently rather wealthier and somewhat larger town of Monster (yes really) a few km up the coast, where we stopped for food, didn't run to a bookshop.