As Lisa relates here, we had the joy of encountering a Royal Delft Peacock Symphony cup in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport this week, a cup significant because it was the subject of a print that Lisa carved and printed last year and exhibited at The Gallery.

To see and feel the actual cup—her reference had been a photograph—was remarkable.

One of the joys of our recent trip was renting app-based e-bikes from Dott (in Liège) and Lime (in Rotterdam).

The scheme is similar for both. First, you download their app and set up an account and payment method. Once you’ve down that, it’s as simple as walking up to a bike, by happenstance or by locating one on the map in the app, and scanning a QR code. The bike unlocks, and off you ride

There are various rules in place, depending on the city, for where you can leave bikes. Liège seemed generally more permissive, whereas Rotterdam had more restrictions. Once you’ve found a legal place to leave the bike, you “end the ride” in the app, the bike locks, and off you walk. It’s very freeing to be able to just leave the bike, move on, and find another one later on if needed.

The bikes were powerful, at least compared to the Dutch bikes, powered by our legs. If you’ve never ridden an e-bike, it can feel like getting on a horse and immediately galloping. Or like you’re a superhero. Hilly terrain is reduced from a pain in the ass to a little bit of extra pedalling. 

We had bicycle helmets with us to use on our cycle tour from Brussels to Bruges; despite helmet usage in Belgium and the Netherlands being optional (and relatively rare, though increasing), we wouldn’t have ridden without them. It was worth the additional layer of safety to cart them around with us, and after a while it was just natural to have them with us.

In both Liège and Rotterdam they ended up being our primary way of getting around, and in both cases I think doing so enhanced our relationship with the cities and their geography.

Both cities are extremely bicycle friendly, with cycleways or dedicated bicycle lanes almost everywhere. Many intersections have dedicated bicycle cycling (with call buttons located a bicycle height, convenient to the path). By comparison, cycling in Charlottetown feels barbaric.

There were times, especially in Rotterdam, that having powerful e-bikes under us, while riding through the chaotic life of the city, with myriad other bikes and pedestrians and cars, felt just on the edge of too much.

But we made our way. And it was generally a joy.

One thing we needed to be concerned about when cycling longer distances than we were used to — 45 to 55 km per day — was the health of our nether regions.

Everything I read suggested that there’s nothing that can shut a cycle tour faster and more definitively than the chafing, pressure sores, and infections that can result from not paying attention.

So we paid attention.

We both got outfitted with cycling shorts from Outer Limit before we left, and supplemented with another pair from Kameo in Liège. These are padded shorts that fit tightly. You wear them right against your skin, with no underwear, and they serve to cushion your sit bones and reduce chafing. 

Wearing them off the bike feels like wearing an ill-fitting diaper; wearing them on the bike is much more comfortable than just wearing street clothes.

Between cycle shorts and skin we lubed up, several times a day, with a healthy spread of chamois cream—also from Outer Limit—in any area that might experience chafing. 

I was very liberal with the chamois cream: I slathered it everywhere.

That we finished the ride is a testament to the fact that it all worked.

After day one I did have a little sensitivity in the “apex of the intergluteal cleft,” and I jumped right on this with an application of Inotyol zinc oxide cream—the pharmacist said “it’s the one grandmother’s have always trusted,” and I was sold. The issue didn’t return.

The day after the tour ended, I was afraid I was developing a pressure sore, and I applied zinc oxide cream there too, and that seemed to address it.

Managing all of this required a suspension of disbelief after a lifetime of thinking cyclists wearing cycle shorts were just showing off (and weird looking). I’m glad I was able to muster that, as the tour that resulted was all the better for it. 

Thanks to our pro cycling friends Cynthia and Matt for advice and counsel.

For decades, my practice when travelling to Europe was to make one of my first stops upon first landing the cell phone shop of whatever carrier had the best deal on a prepaid SIM card. I’d end up with a combined package of voice, texts, and data for the time I’d be away.

The introduction of the eSIM — a SIM card, but without the card, that gets virtually installed into the phone via an app — has made things a lot simpler: no need to make the visit to the shop, as the entire transaction can be done from an app; no need to fiddle with SIM card cutters (yes, there was such a thing); and “topping up” — always the Achilles heel of any low-end SIM card, happens in the same app, so no more visits to tobacco shops to purchase top-up minutes.

This last trip, to Belgium and the Netherlands, I decided to go one step further, and to dispense with a plan that included voice and text, and go data-only. I choose Jetpac, somewhat at random, and the process of selecting a plan and installing the eSIM proved easy and relatively inexpensive.

The open question: were there going to be circumstances where I’d miss having a real European telephone number, with the ability to send and receive texts and make voice calls.

Here’s what happened on the ground:

• In Liège, the app-based ebike rental scheme was Dott, and the Dott app required confirmation vis SMS during the initial setup phase. I worked around this by setting up a free 3-day try virtual SMS from Hushed.
• In Ghent, I needed to make a voice call to the organizer of our bike tour, to get permission to make a repair to Lisa’s bike. I was able to do this by buying some voice minutes to use inside the Jetpac app, which acts as a voice-over-IP app for making outgoing calls. The only downside: they couldn’t call me back, because it’s outgoing-only.
• To communicate with Android-owning Belgian and Dutch friends to coordinate lunch plans, we used Signal.
• To communicate with home (and with each other), we used Apple’s iMessages app and FaceTime.

All in all, I didn’t missing the native texting and voice calling abilities, and for future travels I plan to repeat the data-only plan.

Yesterday we climbed down the ladder from the loft bed in our Rotterdam Home Exchange at 6:30 a.m.; almost 24 hours later, clumbed into bed at home in Charlottetown.

In between we took a metro to Rotterdam central station, a train to Schiphol Airport, flew to Toronto, had a layover there, and then flew to Charlottetown. In the way all transatlantic travel feels when it’s over, it feels like magic, like it shouldn’t be physically possible to move so far so fast.

Our trip was a delight, a combination of resting in place (in Liège),  moving under our own cycle power (from Brussels to Bruges), with a coda of the maximum modernity that is Rotterdam. Along the way we got to spend time with friends (here, here), a lovely addition.

In the book shop at Schiphol I came across the book How to Travel, and the chapter “The Pleasure of the Romantic Minibreak,” which starts:

One of the stranger aspects of relationships is that we  may, in order to sustain them, need to go away together every now and then. 

In theory, it should make no difference to love quite where we happen to be. But in practice, the furniture may have to alter, so that we can. The familiar backdrop of home keeps us too tightly and punitively tethered to whom we have so often been – which may mean, to the less impressive and more unkind versions of ourselves. The sofa remembers that argument we once had on it; the kitchen keeps us connected to some unpleasant scenes that unfolded in it over too many evenings. But the new surroundings have no such memories. They allow us to start afresh and rediscover wellsprings of affection and generosity. 

More than anything else, it’s those “wellsprings of affection and generosity” that I will remember from this trip: lubricated by miles on bicycles, cactus beers, accidental finds, accidental falls, by the myriad pleasures of being a connected partnership engaged in a grand adventure.

Kevin Kelly, in Your Most Improbable Life:

Your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be. Your path, your character, your life, should be the most unlikely, the most unexpected, the least predictable version you can make. Improbable lives have fewer competitors, more unique rewards, and are harder to replace with AIs, since AIs run on the predictable. This is true whether you favor traditional humanist directions or work on a frontier.