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18.3.60

Hi My Love - and Folks too!

Guess what? I am now comfortably seated in the lovely common room of the
Amsterdam youth hostel!! We made it to Groningen this morning (35 km.), and
found ourselves tired, cold, and pessimistic, just as a small train went by
about 1/2 mile away. The idea struck like lightning and we took a 2 1/2 hour ride the
whole way to here, arriving about 2;30 this afternoon. So now we've rescheduled the
remaining days, leaving a little more time in The Hague, Haarlem, etc, and cutting
our biking distance on the Rhine to about 50 km/day, with full days in Köln and
Heidelberg. It sounds much more pleasant and less exhausting - involves another
fairly long train trip - Rotterdam - Köln to further eliminate long dull days of
biking for distance. This raises the cost of the trip a little but increases the enjoyment
immensely. For example our ride today cost about $3.25 including bike fares!

The countryside this morning was just so flat as that we saw coming from Leer into
Holland yesterday - a carpet of lush greens fields as far as the horizon, occasional trees
and less frequent red house-barn clusters. Today the trees were fewer and
the canals much more frequent. The fields are cut every few yards by canals, like
irrigation ditches, and every couple of miles on crosses a large canal with passage
for barges or small ships (often houseboats too) There is a very complete network of
these canals even very far inland and as we neared Groningen we began to see
along the canal signs of industry - ship repairs dry docks, scrap yards etc. on a large
scale.

9:45 and 10 is lights out- G'night! to be continued

Hi again -7:15 AM and breakfast at 8. Boy this hostel is really a beauty - warm showers,
heated sleeping rooms, lovely common room here (for reading , writing letters etc.). This and
Hamburg are the two nicest I've seen yet; and I hear The Hague is also a good one. And they cost
so little -- in Germany 17c a night to sleep, here 60c including a rented sleepsack and
breakfast. A wonderful deal and it's too bad America doesn't encourage its youth to
travel by providing similar facilities.

The train ride from Groningen to Amsterdam yesterday was a pleasant one We pulled
bread, cheese, fruitcake out of our packs, bought milk and thus had lunch. The countryside
changed gradually back to that between Oldenburg and Leer in northern Germany --
more and more forests (again many evergreens, even at sea level) and perhaps fewer
canals, though Amsterdam has as many as it has streets. We passed through several
towns (Zwolle is the only name I remember) and noted that here as in northern Germany
there are a few slums -- small run-down wooden shacks, usually along hte railroad where
the land is not usuable for anything else. These are nowhere present in Southern
Germany--a remarkable condition in part explained by the fewer large cities and greater
number of farm families.

The weather for the last several days has remained cloudy and overcast, pretty