The following was first posted on Avontuur. I’ve thought better about crossposting stuff here from LiveJournal: a lot of what I post there is vey brief, or memes floating around LJ, or aimed at the particular community there.
It turns out that cycling along beside a canal in spring in Holland is fun, too. The weather was absolute crap, but I was waterproofed enough not to mind.
I rode to Amsterdam with two of the rowers I’d come to cheer on, heding into heavier and heavier rain and colder temperatures the further north we went. It’s halfway across the Netherlands, an hour and a half when traffic cooperates – the rowers at our club here think our stories of driving 6 or 12 hours to a regatta sounds just awful. The kind woman who drove brought along a pair of rainpants and boots for me, and one of ther other women in the boat let me use her folding bike. The nice thing about those is that the seat height is much more adjustable than on a normal bike so it fit me just fine.
The rowing club was completely packed, much more so than last year, because it was too cold and wet to stand outside (even for the Dutch). Walking through the locker room and the lounge upstairs was an exercise in fitting n+1 cubic meters of people into n cubic meters of space. (I’ve never seen so many naked women in one small space – the locker rom, not the lounge, of course.) I didn’t mention it to the crew I came with, but all of the junior girls getting off the water were shivering and wet. Eventually all the women in “my” crew met up, and got ready to launch. I helped carry the oars, then took off on the bike.
With waterproof covering on all but my face and hands, I was fairly comfortable. It was maybe about 8 degrees C (around 45 F), not bad if you’re dry and active but I was glad not to be rowing. You wear what you’ll want to have on during the race, with maybe a light jacket for before and after – there’s no room in the boat for anything more. And of course between the rain and the splashing endemic to rowing they were all wet through by the end of the race. They turned the course around this year, so the race started in the city and went out from it. This meant that crews had only about 1km to warm up in, and then had to row 7 km back after the end of the race. I had to leave my hood off most of the time for visibility, but cycling kept me plenty warm. On the way there I stayed with the boat, along with a few other partisans on wheels. It’s hard to cheer for a crew in another language! For one thing, they don’t shout the same things we do (like “Timing” or “Concentrate” or “Keep it strong”) so I couldn’t do straight translations even when I knew the words. For another, we don’t usually ride alongside a race, so I’m not used to having to yell for that long except when I’m coxing and then I have more specifics to talk about. I copied the rest of the cheering section, yelling things like “Allez Beatrix!” and “Kom op, Dames!” (“Come on ladies!”). On the way back, I’d ride ahead of the boat and then stop to take pictures, of them or daffodils or cattails or combinations of those.
Here is my series of “Rowing in Spring” photos. I include the one with the swan because I like the annoyance on its face, at all these rowers invading *his* river!
There seems to be a rule that every regatta here has to go past a windmill at some point in the race:
By the time we got back, they were frozen, so most of the crew went to shower and change while their (well-bundled) coxswain, other club members and I derigged the boat. They appreciated having the support during and after the race, and I had a much better time than spending Sunday in a hotel room. Afterward was the post-race banquet; by the time I got dropped off at the club, it was late enough that it seemed silly to go back to the hotel room and then back again, so I stayed and lent a hand with the setup (my day to be helpful, I guess), switched my hair from its two pigtail braids to something more decorous, and just hoped most other people wouldn’t be too dressed up. They weren’t, since those in the later events had come straight there. The food was good, and very welcome after a long day, but by then my contact lenses were fogging over so I left fairly early.
And today Ted is here! Only not here, precisely: he got stuck in a late meeting and is still not back from work yet (it’s after 8PM), despite having arrived at o’dark thirty this morning. I think he’s running on coffee fumes. I also think having separate cars this trip was a very wise move.