With no tour in the morning, we started covering kilometers fairly early, heading north out of Leiden. We discovered there was a significant commercial area north of the old city center. We also found an unusual ‘pedestrian’ on the trail.
Then we bent westward and arrived at the beach near Noordwijk.
We had a pie break at the ZeeuMuee (seagull) restaurant on the beach. Then we rode north through the dunes with a pleasant, cooling breeze off the sea. We stopped for a rest break near one of the “bike highway” signs.
We spotted a rare deer, then later a probably-sick fox. After a while I realized that essentially every square meter of land in The Netherlands is controlled by people. Obviously the polders (land “reclaimed” from lakes or the sea) would be back under water if people didn’t keep pumping the water out, but even the forested areas in the dunes were actually planted forests – trees and grasses were planted there to slow erosion. And most everything that is not dunes is either farm land or cities. So it really is a bit unusual to see wildlife other than birds.
We stopped for lunch at the beach resort of Zandvoort (sand fort) where a couple people went swimming.
Then we turned east and rode into Haarlem.
We arrived early in the afternoon, and went to an organ concert at a church.
The photo shows the organ (which is pretty fancy), but notice the wood ceiling above it. In contrast to similarly-sized and constructed churches in the rest of Europe, most of the churches in The Netherlands have wood ceilings and roof supports. This is done to make the whole building lighter, and thus less likely to sink into the peaty, sandy, and often saturated ground.
We cruised a way down the main canal before and during dinner.
After dinner the crew had arranged a surprise visit to an organ grinder museum. There we listened to a dozen different self-playing organs of various sizes and styles from various eras since 1900.
One of our tour guides, Janneke, grinding the smallest organ.
They had music “books” for a lot of the songs you would expect to hear on organs. Most of these organs also had drums and/or bells or chimes, so they could make some “non-organ-ic” sounds. The volunteers working there asked if we had any song requests so we looked through the music books and found some fun stuff. There was a medley of Queen songs and another medley of The Phantom of the Opera, both of which they played for us.