Orange Alert

Total 1710km
Today 41km
Oirshot to Dongen
Mostly cloudy in the morning, thunder storms late afternoon, high 31c

We took a day off riding to explore the town of Oirshot and enjoy the quiet campground.

Chris, the owner of the campground was great. We asked if we could wash our bikes as we checked in, and it was no problem. Yesterday morning he asked when we wanted to wash them, and proceeded to set us up with a hose and buckets. Do we need any degreaser? No, we’re good.

My mattress has developed a slow leak, so we used the pool to check for bubbles. Chris was in there like a dirty shirt helping us to submerge it. Unfortunately there were no bubbles, and even coating it in soapy water didn’t indicate where the leak is. It will need to go back to Big Agnes.

BTW this is the cleanest campground we’ve been in Europe so far!

Thatched roofs are popular in the Netherlands.

The Dutch have cycling all figured out, it is just so amazing to ride here. The city cyclists have their own infrastructure. When we deviated from our planned route in Tilburg, as usual we used Google maps to locate what we’re looking for. Now Google maps is absolutely terrible for bicycle routing, but that’s not a problem here because bicycle paths are everywhere! You think Google is going to spit you out onto a major road, but no, you turn onto another bicycle path.

Today there was an orange weather alert for severe thunderstorms. We planned our ride so we could be set up at the new campsite before things became ugly, and ugly it did become.

No sooner did we get the tent set up when the rumbling started, and it was constant. It’s been raining off and mostly on all evening. Fortunately the campground has a yurt setup for us to hang out in. It’s equipped with a refrigerator, a couple of hot plates and pots and pans.

This should all be over by tomorrow morning, and it promises to be another day of riding in sunshine.