Day 24 – The Restaurant at the Middle of the Bridge

We awoke to thunder and heavy rain. I rolled over and decided I wouldn’t get out of bed today. By 8.30am the skies had cleared and the sun was out which meant I had to get up. How rude.

The day started with a long, straight and boring road which we had to share with cars. It was very exposed. There was no shelter from the strong wind which came at us from the left. After about 30 minutes of cycling the rain came. There was a house up ahead with a bunch of trees, so we stopped there for shelter and put our wet weather trousers on.

The next 20 kms was like this. Long, straight road with occasional horizontal rain. Then we came to the bridge. We have been following a route recommended to us by Motorbike Man who we met a few days ago. It’s a 300 km route around a lake with a 30 km bridge crossing.

I had been a bit worried about the bridge crossing, especially in these high winds. As it turned out, we had a wonderful tail wind and there was a dyke wall to protect us from the North sea on the left. We were riding along thinking we were pretty hardcore – cycling across a 30 km bridge, when we met a pair of little old ladies cycling in the opposite direction – INTO the wind. They must have been in their 70s.

We stopped at the restaurant in the middle of the bridge and took some photos.

We had done 60kms when we decided to stop for the night at an amazing B&B. On arrival the lady brought us coffee and a pastry which we ate in the garden.

To save costs, we bought a cooked chicken and some salad to eat in the garden for dinner. Mike grabbed our plastic plates and sporks, and our coffee mugs to drink our wine from. As we were laying out our picnic the lady said “why don’t you use the guest kitchen?” Grrr, she could have told us that when we checked in. We could have cooked a meal.

Anyway – we moved all our food inside and ate from real plates, used proper knives and forks and most importantly we drank our wine from real wine glasses.