CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A 264 km round trip from Rijnsburg - roughly 3 h 48 in the saddle. The stops in between: Fort along the Pampus, Schokland and Surroundings and back through Fort along the Pampus. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Speed drops and stays down. Park rather than crawl through. 65 km through ground somebody thought worth listing. The road passes it rather than bypassing it.
A Roman fort is a surprising thing to find in a Dutch village, but Valkenburg has one buried underneath it, and the old Rhine still runs past its doorstep. The centre of the village is a small cluster of houses, a church and a few shops around a bend of the Oude Rijn, a few kilometres from the dunes of the North Sea coast. Roman soldiers built a fort here, Praetorium Agrippinae, to guard the river frontier of the empire, and the site is part of the Lower German Limes, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage property.
Read the complete Valkenburg-Centrum write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Valkenburg-Centrum is where the day begins. Next is Fort along the Pampus.
Out in the open water of the IJmeer, a few kilometres off the old fortified town of Muiden, a low circular fortress sits on an artificial island. This is Pampus, one of more than forty forts that make up the Defence Line of Amsterdam, a ring of fortifications built around the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The idea was simple and very Dutch: in case of attack, large areas of land around the city would be flooded to a depth that was too shallow for boats and too deep for soldiers to wade, and the forts would guard the roads, railways and dykes that crossed the flooded zone. Pampus guarded the approach to Amsterdam by water. The line was listed by UNESCO in 1996.
Read the complete Fort along the Pampus write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Fort along the Pampus comes up about 55 km into the recorded legs. Next is Schokland and Surroundings.
Schokland was once an island in the Zuiderzee, a long, narrow strip of peat and clay surrounded by an inland sea that constantly threatened to swallow it. For centuries, its inhabitants lived on raised mounds and fought a losing battle against the water, as storms ate away at the island's edges. By the mid-nineteenth century, life had become so precarious that in 1859 the Dutch government ordered the island to be evacuated. Then, in the twentieth century, the Dutch did something extraordinary: they enclosed the Zuiderzee with a dam, the Afsluitdijk, completed in 1932, and drained large parts of it to create new land. The Noordoostpolder, drained in 1942, swallowed Schokland, and the former island now rises slightly above the surrounding fields, a long green ridge in a flat landscape of farmland. In 1995, Schokland became the first Dutch site to be listed by UNESCO, as a symbol of the Netherlands' heroic struggle against the water.
Read the complete Schokland and Surroundings write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 133 km into the recorded legs you reach Schokland and Surroundings. Next is back through Fort along the Pampus.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Fort along the Pampus write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Fort along the Pampus, late in the day. Next is Valkenburg-Centrum.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Valkenburg-Centrum write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Valkenburg-Centrum. That is the ride.
Valkenburg-Centrum → Fort along the Pampus is 55 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Fort along the Pampus → Schokland and Surroundings is 78 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Schokland and Surroundings → back through Fort along the Pampus is 76 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Fort along the Pampus → Valkenburg-Centrum is 55 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.