Mountain biking

If, for some reason, I cannot go cycling with the club, I often choose to cycle the Rhenen and Amerongen routes on the Utrechtse Heuvelrug. I can get there cycling directly from my home Wageningen, making a round trip of about 55 km and it has about 600 height-meters, which is not bad for round here. Yesterday I could not go with the others, so today I headed for that route. All being well, I would get round before it got too hot this afternoon. At least that was the theory. I had a bit of a late start, so it was 27 degrees by the time I got back, but that was only for the last few kilometres, so was survivable.

The other potential disadvantage of the warm weather is that it can sometimes get very busy on that route. In the summer, if I'm going to cycle it sometime over the weekend, I usually try and do it on the Friday for that reason, but that wasn't possible this time. However, today it was not so bad, and I got the impression that even though there were quite a lot of other mountain bikers, they were mostly cycling about the same speed as me, so no hassle with stopping to let people past all the time. I often seem to be about the slowest on the trail. There were large numbers of walkers, though. As usual, a few had wandered onto the mountain bike route, which is not illegal, but potentially dangerous, when faster cyclists than me whizz past.

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As well as the hilly nature of the terrain, another advantage of the Amerongen route is that it has some beautiful woodland. It is quite varied, with different tree species in different areas. With all the rain of the last months, it was also looking much greener than usual for August. There are also some patches of heathland, which was covered in the purple flowers of heather, and so looking quite magnificent.

The rain had not only watered the forest, it had also caused quite a lot of erosion. I was glad of my rear suspension as I bounced over some bits. The erosion also meant that some of the drop offs where you can make little jumps were a little higher than usual, so that was fun. The people who maintain the trails do their best, but it is a bit of an impossible task at the moment. Having said that, the routes are perfectly doable with a hardtail. There were also some corners where it had dried out, and then the problem was more that there were some small drifts of loose sand waiting to whip my front wheel out from under me.

It had been a while since I last cycled that route, and I was reminded of how much I enjoyed it.