After an hour in Delft we continued north. Just look at that weather; cold and wet in London, sunny and warm in Holland :)

30kms later we hit Leiden. Home to 100,000 also, and largely a university town. Albert Einstein even spent some time at Leiden University during his career. We arrived early afternoon and the centre of town was packed with people soaking up the rays outside the many cafes and restaurants, or showing off their killer mullet while boating up the canal.

The Netherlands is famous for its rather liberal policies toward drugs. These two were rolling a joint nearby, and Dav set about befriending them and finding out where they got that hahaha!

We spent the next couple hours soaking up the rays ourselves along the canal, and knocking back the local brew. We also discovered that the service in some cafes can be pretty shit unless you're somewhat assertive towards your waiter (like the locals), else you tend to be ignored.

After leaving Leiden we ventured through more suburbia of towns and villages

I saw a lot of these trees - bloody weird-looking things. They look more like roadside power poles.

Nice day to be a gnome :)

Eventually we left suburbia behind and started to find our reason for coming this way...

...flower fields!

The area north of Leiden is full of these multi-coloured fields. As we're only just coming into spring, there weren't as many as there would be at the height of summer, but they were still an amazing sight!

Dav the idiot. I mean scarecrow.

Look at these assholes.

I don't recall the name of this town, but the main street here reminded me a lot of Sluis, the little town on the Netherlands border with Belgium that I biked to a couple years ago on my birthday.

From windmills and flowers to highland cows hahaha - these were the last thing I expected to see in the Netherlands! I thought they mainly hung around the Scottish highlands, but evidently not.

Dav wanted a photo with this one, but couldn't get over his phobia of its horns hehe.

More suburbia.

And on the subject of suburbia, I really enjoyed riding through it and seeing how the natives live and to some degree experiencing a bit of their culture. Dav on the other hand had become pretty bored with this hehe. I had designed our routes with the help of RouteYou.com, which allows you to pick multiple points on a map and calculates a 'nice' route between them all that avoids main roads and includes more scenic ones (and then allows you to download that route to a GPS unit).

Some 50kms later we reached Haarlem, which was to be our destination for the night. However, it was so dead-quiet that I didn't even bother to get a photo of it, and we decided instead to do the extra 20kms to Amsterdam (much more exciting, obviously).

Near Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport. A plane crashed in a field near this area just a couple months back, so I was keeping an eye out ;)

We made it to Amsterdam a bit before sunset having done 110kms today, and it was just as gorgeous as I remember it (I spent a few hours running around here in February last year during a stop-over en route to New York).

Over the previous couple hours the sky had really darkened, and by now we were starting to hear thunder in the distance.

We raced through central Amsterdam (which was great fun) to an area Dav knew of that was full of hotels and hostels. However, thanks to it being Easter, not a single bloody one had accommodation (unless we were willing to pay over €60 each, which we weren't).

Darkness set it, and so did a torrential thunder storm that wouldn't let up. With nowhere immediately obvious to stay, we found an Internet cafe to try and search something out. While there Dav found a central hotel in Utrecht - about 50kms south and what was to be our destination for the following night.

The new plan was to catch a train and spend the next two nights in Utrecht, making this the second time I'd only had a few hours in Amsterdam! This was the view from the train platform. It didn't come out too well on camera but it was a bloody impressive downpour!