Well it's pretty late now so I will start my ride report but I will probably end up editing my story again tomorrow when I see all the mistakes I make.
Thursday morning at 0920 I arrived at Hotel Figi in Zeist after an hour and a quarters ride to get there to find that Ton and Robin had already parked up in front of the hotel so I parked my bike next to them.
After greetings and a bit of a conversation (about bikes of course), we decided to grab a cup of coffee at the hotel, luckily they had tables outside ( mainly as I didn't think we would really fit in in the rather upperclass hotel in our bikers gear). Zeist was a nice town with a couple of impressive buildings (including "
Zeist Castle") nearby. By the time Andre arrived I had already had two coffees so I went for a third :thumbup: In Andre's defence he had been partying until late (or rather early) and the meeting time had been posted quite late.
Before we left the Hotel we took a few pics:
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After this we decided to do some morning exercises
Andre took us a really nice route towards Rhenen, passing
Austerlitz (a town where a significant number of Napoleonic troops had been stationed and had been named after one of Napoleons famous battles) one of the highest points in the region, and we conquered the "Amerongse mountain"

after this we rode down to the bridge at Rhenen to cross the river. It's really great when you've got local people riding with you as they always know the best routes :thumbup:
After riding for a short while I took a wrong tuning and we ended up taking a short ride on the motorway, got off at the next turning and headed for our first dike of the day. This was a really nice windy dike where you could see cagers and cyclists coming from a long distance away, this was my kind of road :thumbup:
We followed this dike nearly all the way to the Nijmegen bridge (unfortunately we had to leave the dike before the bridge as it became a cycle path, with a very small cycle turnstile, obviously to keep motorbikes off it).
We crossed the bridge and arrived in Nijmegen centre. We went to the city square and parked up the bikes, we went for lunch at the old corn exchange (well the "weighing house" anyway.). At this point I rang Tim who lives in Nijmegen and he arrived about 10 minutes later.
With all the riders together we had a nice lunch and once again chatted about bikes 'n stuff :thumbup:
Just before we set off I asked a young lady to take a few pics of us and our bikes:
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With the help of Tim we found our way out of Nijmegen and out onto the Dike heading towards Germany. The dike was pretty busy close to Nijmegen and we had to pick our way between cyclists, walkers and cagers but the further we went the quieter it got so we could ride as a group again.
We went across the border into Germany and hit some nice roads (despite a couple of extra circuits which the zumo seemed to want us to do

)
On the way back to Nijmegen we decided to get around the city pretty quickly and head towards a dike on the other side. After a bit more riding i heard a very distinctive (faint) sound of a Fazer horn go off and Robin left us to head back home ( as he had said earlier).
After riding a bit more Tim peeled off to head back home. We rode on to a really nice little historic town called Ravenstein where we stopped for coffee. Once again this is where local knowledge played its part as Ton knew about this little gem of a place, and a great cafe with the most delicious apple pie and coffee ,Thumbsup:
Afterwards we rode along the dike and we came across this little castle it had been partly destroyed in the past and rebuilt, here's a photo of the place and a picture of how it used to look:
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