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 364 km round trip from Woerden - roughly 5 h 14 in the saddle. On the way it passes Coastal Fort near Ijmuiden, Schokland and Surroundings and back through Coastal Fort near Ijmuiden. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
The ride follows Dutch Flower Route for 66 km.
Woerden is a small Dutch town on the Oude Rijn, the old Rhine, halfway between Utrecht and Leiden, in the middle of the Green Heart of Holland, a landscape of polders, meadows, ditches and cows. Its centre is a compact old town ringed by canals, with a castle, a big church and a windmill on the old ramparts. The Romans were here too: Woerden lies on the line of the Lower German Limes, and the remains of a Roman fort lie beneath the town centre.
Read the complete Woerden-Centrum write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Woerden-Centrum is where the day begins. Next is Coastal Fort near Ijmuiden.
At the mouth of the North Sea Canal, where giant locks let ocean-going ships into the waterway that leads to Amsterdam, a round island fort sits in the middle of the harbour. This is Fort IJmuiden, also called Forteiland, built in the 1880s as the westernmost stronghold of the Defence Line of Amsterdam, a ring of forts, dikes and flood fields designed to protect the capital by inundating the land around it. The Defence Line, now part of the UNESCO-listed Dutch Water Defence Lines, is one of the more ingenious military systems ever devised: rather than walls, it relied on water a few decimetres deep, too shallow for boats and too deep for marching.
Read the complete Coastal Fort near Ijmuiden write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Coastal Fort near Ijmuiden comes up about 66 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 183 km into the recorded legs you reach Schokland and Surroundings. Next is back through Coastal Fort near Ijmuiden.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Coastal Fort near Ijmuiden write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Coastal Fort near Ijmuiden, late in the day. Next is Woerden-Centrum.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Woerden-Centrum write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Woerden-Centrum. That is the ride.
Woerden-Centrum → Coastal Fort near Ijmuiden is 66 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Coastal Fort near Ijmuiden → Schokland and Surroundings is 117 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Schokland and Surroundings → back through Coastal Fort near Ijmuiden is 115 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Coastal Fort near Ijmuiden → Woerden-Centrum is 66 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.