When I lived in living in Colorado one of my favorite weekend activities was to climb the mountains that pressed up against the west side of the city.  From this vantage point at the top I could see for miles.  On Colorado's characteristically dry, low-humidity, days I felt like I could see so far that I could actually peer into farm houses in Kansas to the east.  The Netherlands doesn't provide such views.  With most the country formally a sea bed, there are no mountains and few hills.  The joke around here is the dikes that hold back the sea water are the mountains.  So Haidee and I decided to climb one.  

 

With the bike finally fully licensed and insured we hopped on one slightly chilly Saturday morning to go north.  Sure it was cold out but freedom has its price.  We headed north up the peninsula to the very top.  The same way San Francisco sits on the tip of a peninsula protecting a huge internal bay, Den Helder holds the same role in Netherlands.  

 

Den Helder at one point was called Helledore or "Gate to Hell" because of all it's fortified forts and military bases.  It was a key site during the Golden Age where the world traveling Flying Dutchmen ships would gather as a launching point across the world's oceans or gathering point upon their return.  It was invaded by Ango-Russian forces in 1799 and was visited by Napoleon in 1811, who was so impressed by its strategic location that he ordered construction of a fortified military base and naval dockyards immediately.  For years it stood as the last point of defense to keep North Sea ships from entering the Zuiderzee, the large inland sea that dominates the center of the country, including treasured ports like Amsterdam.  

 

Its strategic value lessened in 1932 after a 6 year construction project dammed the Zuiderzee and turned it into what became a fresh water lake which is now called the IJsselmeer.  This 32km dam, known as the Afsluitdijk, forever closed off the Zuiderzee from the North Sea and further impressed upon the world the Dutch's mastery over water management.  Still, Den Helder pokes out like a thumb an acts as a demarcation for several things.  It is the end of the North Sea.  It is the start of a chain of islands that travel like a dotted line up the coast into Germany looking a bit like a combover hiding some sensitive spots on the coast.  It is the start of the Wadden Sea which sits between the islands and the Afsluitdijk.  And its history and buildings sit proudly like old war medals in a dusty box recalling the days when Den Helder proudly stood between the heart of the Netherlands and the rest of the world.  

 

Haidee and I were here to climb a dike however.  We drove into town and kept pushing north until there was nothing left but a parking lot.  A large green hill sat before us.  Its angles and artificial smoothness immediately gave it away.  We parked the bike and climbed the dike.  At the top of the dike we were at the highest altitude we've been at since arriving at the Netherlands.  We must have been a dizzying 50-60 feet above sea level.  I gasped for oxygen and at this altitude I was sure my nose would begin to bleed.  From out mount we could over look the town of Den Helder, the North Sea, Texel Island (the first of the combover islands), and Wadden Sea.  

 

On the way home we stopped for coffee a few times to warm up.  On one of our stops we discovered, quite by accident, the town of Edam.  The town is so impossibility cute, so impossibility adorable that if Disney had to create an impossibility cute and impossibly adorable town they would have invented a town just like this.  But this town is real and these houses have people living in them and thankfully no minimum wage teenagers had to sweat it out inside a large mouse suit.  

 

 

Edam is known for the cheese by the same name, a round cheese covered in a rubber coating mostly seen in America during Christmas on decorative cheese plates.  Most of the world's Edam cheese doesn't come from Edam anymore, rather from mass production factories in Germany.  Still, Edam is still identified for its namesake cheese.  

We stopped at a restaurant for coffee and a brief warm up but the food looked so good we decided to get some of our own.  Just another pleasant surprise in a day of pleasant surprises.  

 

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