My First Morning on a Brompton: A Guest's Diary from Amsterdam

I landed at Schiphol a little before ten in the morning, wheeling a suitcase I'd packed and repacked three times the week before. Eight days, one small folding bicycle, and a country I'd only ever seen in postcards of tulip fields. I remember thinking, quite clearly, "I am fifty-eight years old and about to learn to cycle in a foreign country." It wasn't quite nerves. It was closer to the feeling before a first day at a new job, when you know it will be fine but haven't quite believed it yet.

The bikes were waiting for us at the hotel, still folded into their travel cases. Watching Eugene and the team check each one over, tyres, brakes, the fold itself, was oddly reassuring. Every rider had the same Brompton, down to the last bolt. Someone joked that if anything went wrong with hers, half the group could lend a spare part. Eugene didn't laugh it off. He said that was exactly the point. One bike, one set of parts, and a support vehicle that always carries the right one. Nobody's holiday hinges on a rare spare part turning up.

We gathered outside for the orientation not long after, helmets on, bags already clipped to our bikes. I have a photo from that morning, all of us in a loose circle outside a glass-fronted building, one guide mid-sentence with his hand raised, explaining how the Dutch ride on their side of the path and how to signal a turn. It's a good photo because nobody is posing. We were listening, a little wide-eyed, the way you do before doing something new for the first time in years.

Getting our bearings before the first pedal stroke

Then we rode. Amsterdam eased us in gently, wide cycle lanes, canal water flashing between buildings, bicycles gliding past in both directions like they'd been doing it their whole lives, which of course they had. Forty kilometres was the plan for the day, no support vehicle trailing us yet, just the city and then open road toward Zaanse Schans. I won't pretend I wasn't watching my gears more than the scenery for the first half hour. But somewhere past the last of the rooftops, the road opened into flat green farmland, hedgerows and grazing fields on either side, and I stopped thinking about my gears altogether.

There's a stretch of that ride I still think about. Wide sky, a line of trees down one side, two of the ladies ahead of me pedalling unhurried, nothing to hear but tyres on tarmac and someone's laugh drifting back on the wind. Nobody was racing anywhere. That was rather the point of the whole thing, wasn't it.

Just the road and the group.

We stopped for a hearty lunch somewhere along the way, the kind of meal that tastes better after a real morning's ride, then carried on toward the windmills.

Dinner that evening was in Amsterdam Noord, and by then the group had gone from polite strangers to something closer to old friends comparing notes on sore legs and favourite moments. Someone already had photos of the windmills up on her phone, showing them to the table. I remember thinking how strange it was, that after one day I already felt looked after rather than led. Bags handled, bikes handled, even the worrying handled, mostly by me not needing to do it.

Tomorrow we'd ride to Leiden by way of Keukenhof, right in the thick of tulip season. I went to bed that first night with legs that felt properly used and a mind already half in the flower fields. Whatever nerves I'd landed with that morning, they'd folded up and gone quiet, rather like the bicycle waiting by my door.

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