The baseball season has started again and while that’s great in its own right, it does mean I have little time left for doing bike rides. Hence, today’s day off (for Good Friday), combined with beautiful weather (sunny and 15 °C or 59 °F), was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I ended up doing a leisurely 26.6-km ride (16.6 mi) through the farmland and lake area northeast of Leiden.

Starting from the B as usual, I did a counterclockwise round-trip past the villages of Leiderdorp, Hoogmade, Rijpwetering and Oud Ade. From the latter, I initially went north towards the Kagerplassen (Kager Lakes), because my map showed a trail running all the way along the lakes back to Leiden. I couldn’t find the trail, so I tracked back to Oud Ade and took an alternative route back.

This area is part of a larger stretch of land known as the Green Heart, a thinly populated area centred between the cities of Rotterdam, Den Haag, Leiden, Haarlem, Amsterdam and Utrecht. The land there has traditionally been much better suited for agriculture than for urban building. So far it has mostly resisted the expansion of the surrounding cities and I hope it will continue to do so. The pictures below should be sufficient reason.

A pasture southwest of the village of Hoogmade, with the village itself just visible in the distance.

The church of Hoogmade.

A dandelion and a red flower whose name I don’t know.

Another dandelion.

A mother sheep with two lambs feeding next to a ditch northeast of Hoogmade.

A duck in the Kagerplassen, a few seconds before it noticed me and took off.

For some more pictures, check out the Kagerplassen Route album in my photo galleries.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 20:04 and is filed under Cycling, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.