Day 2. Egmond aan Zee to Hilarides via the Afsluitdijk contd.
Once on the road again our main goal was Hippolytushoef to pick up groceries and of course visit the cafe with amazing coffee and apple tart. First things first we had a short section that I remembered from last year on the top of a little dyke. The narrow path with a hard surface of seashells is barely twenty centimetres wide. The rest is covered in lush green grass and as if to make things more exciting, grazing sheep wandered freely around.
I pushed on ahead and concentrating hard managed to get my bike above twenty kilometres per hour whist keeping the bike on the path. This section then ended suddenly turning into a short (Dutch) climb and a long dog-leg round what used to be an old island. Within a couple of kilometres we'd hit the outskirts of Hippolytushoef.
Following Paul's expert navigating we ended up in the centre of town and hit the supermarket. Damae and Karen picked up some groceries including fresh fruit and veg and shortly afterwards we hit the church square and 'Eeterij Ongder de Kukel'. We'd stopped here last year and had been very impressed with the service, cake and coffee.
To have a good standard of all three in one cafe in the Netherlands is, in my experience, quite unusual. Often the service, although not unpleasant, leaves something to be desired. Coffee in the Netherlands is frequently a second rate experience requiring plenty of sugar to make it drinkable. Appelgebak is also a very variable product, at worst a good source of sugar and starch, at best a delicious dessert. So Hippolytushoef is thus, for us, cafe heaven.
Leaning our bikes up against the graveyard wall in the sun we found a table inside with a good view of the bikes and the church and sat down. Within a couple of minutes we had given our orders to the waitress. Karen, against our advice, went for a local spiced biscuit whilst me Paul and Damae ordered the 'appelgebak', and we all ordered different types of coffee.
It was, as expected, delicious and a perfect preparation for the remainder of the day. We decided to go all the way across the Afsluitdijk that evening. This had one minor drawback, as once on the dyke you can't get off it and there is nowhere to stay. So we had to do the thirty kilometres or so that evening and then a bit more to a campsite. Paul, on mentioning our planned route to a local, got a dry reply "well the wind is not entirely against you". This turned out to be correct. As we headed out past the side of the cafe towards the dyke, the wind whilst not terribly unfavourable was certainly not a tailwind.
With the calories of the cake and caffeine in the coffee to fortify us we set off in good spirits. We first passed over some large sluice gates, the water was flowing out from the Ijsselmeer to the sea. Then onto the dyke proper. It has to be said that although the Afsluitdijk is a feat of engineering that has saved the Netherlands from repeated flooding, it does make for a rather boring cycle ride (even more so with a headwind). After the first fifteen minutes the end of the dyke was no nearer and the novelty of cycling on such an enormous structure had worn off.