11th August: around Arnhem

Cycling and other travel

to and from Nederlands Openluchtmuseum
distance 19·10 miles (373·62 cumulative miles so far)

The point of yesterday’s long cycle was to gain a day to see things in Arnhem, specifically the Nederlands Openluchtmuseum. Elly’s blog post is much more lucid about it than I can be. I enjoyed the 10 mile cycle without luggage, and I’m sure I would have enjoyed this building museum much more if I hadn’t had a headache for the first couple of hours.

Chips and a melon/mint icecream cured that, and I began to see the delights much more clearly. I think the high-point for me was riding on the old trams, one of which had no doors, just an iron bar pulled horizontal by the guard after he got on. The other thing that was really memorable for me was a barracks for Indonesian workers in the Netherlands. My knowledge of Dutch colonialism in south-east asia is too uncertain to rant here but I don’t imagine that the lives of these workers will have been much fun.

I have to say that I am now massively impressed with Lev’s front-wheel hub-dynamo and USB-werk (to convert the dynamo’s AC output to steady 5-volt USb-friendly output), jPhone was completely drained by the time we left the museum but after about 2 miles, the system provided enough charge to restart the phone and even begin mapping. (Unfortunately, cyclemeter is very sensitive to low battery – it will stop recording if there is less than around 5% charge, so I was only able to record this.) But to get from zero to enough charge for a call in a few minutes’s cycling is fine for me. It shows that the system will not just slow phone battery depletion, it will actually charge the phone. Yeehah!