Extras. Autumn 2007 the missing NSCR link: from Nieuweschans to Delfzijl.
Actually I could have cheated and put a lot of these pictures in any order. The views were pretty much the same in all directions. After more than five kilometres of the sameness, the only benefit being we were steadily turning right and hence further away from the wind, we saw another turning to the right. "Yippee" we thought we are going to get up onto the sea dyke....that is until we turned left again through a lock gate in the interior dyke followed shortly afterwards by another right-left combination.
It was by now a quarter past eleven, and we had been cycling at a good pace for around an hour. We started wondering if it was not time to stop for a cuppa, or even an early lunch. However the landscape did not encourage us to stop at that moment. We wanted a view or funny old building to look at during our break.
Fortunately redemption appeared twenty minutes later in the form of the village of Termunten. As we entered the village we took a right turn that took us up to the sea dyke. Opposite the road we had come in on, was a set of steps up to a bench with, we hoped at least, a sea view. We parked up the bikes and took food and my handlebar bag up with us. At the top we finally got our sea view, which unsurprisingly reminded us of other parts of the Dutch and Danish coasts.
The wind was blowing just a little strongly for the Trangia mini so I had to shield it from the breeze. We sat and ate bread, cheese and the organic tomatoes we had bought the day before. Whilst we were sitting there we noticed that our Bromptons were creating some interest in passers by. We were not sure if it was because they were Bromptons or laden Bromptons or something else. After some tea and chocolate we packed up and descended the steps back to the bikes.
We headed back to the route and after turning right we made a sharp right into a wide alley. At the end we turned right again, and after about twenty metres of climbing were confronted with a very old church at the top of the earthworks. In Friesland and Groningen much of the land was mudflats before systematic drainage and dyke building got underway. Thus the old way of living on the mudflats was to pile up mud and earth and live on top of it. These mounts or 'terpen' were large enough to house people and their livestock in times of high tide.
Many of the 'terpen' have been excavated in the period from the eighteenth century onwards. The earth that had been heaped up was rich in nutrients and was used to improve newly drained and existing farmland. Fortunately some of the old centres remained including this one. The church was obviously old and had clearly been 're-modelled' over the years. In the autumnal sunshine it looked wonderful. After a few photos we said 'cool' a few times and headed back off towards the NSCR.