My first day on the Pieterpad proper took me through several towns and along many farms as I began my journey south through the Netherlands.
It was a little cool overnight. Not too cold, but just enough to suggest my sleeping bag is tired and probably getting close to needing replacement. This, and the lack of wind last night, not to mention the wet grass I was camped on, meant that my tent was completely covered in condensation. Probably, this will become an annoyingly familiar experience this trail. Fortunately (and unexpectedly) the sun managed to shine through the trees and started to warm to wings up, though by the time I packed the tent up, it was still rather wet.
Leaving the campground, the trail almost immediately became a concrete path, following the borders between a field and a canal.
A small, but tall bridge carried the trail over the canal, and gave a nice view of a thicket of wildflowers bordering a field.
After winding around the fields, the Pieterpad followed a leaf-lined trail adjacent to someone’s house, then joined a paved road.
After a short while, the trail found its way into Eenrum. In the fields just outside of town, a cat stalked something — probably a field mouse — through a field.
In town, brick houses lined brick-paved roads. The town’s large church was prominent from many places.
As the Pieterpad ducked down a sidewalk next to the church, a cat lounged across the trail. It was quite displeased it had to get up from its spot to let me go past.
The next small town over, Mensingeweer, had a canal and windmill as its central focus. Several of the homes along the canal had small docks, though none of them had boats out.
This morning (and, really, throughout the day when the trail wasn’t in town), there were occasional benches and picnic tables adjacent to the trail. With the Seoul Trail fresh in mind, I would have liked to see benches more frequently, but this is still much more more seating infrastructure than most other trails I’ve hiked. What was conspicuously missing, though, was public toilets.
In addition to the cats, there were no shortage of slugs on the trail. The recent rain has probably made them more active than usual.
For most of the morning, the only other people I saw walking the trail were three other pairs of people, one pair of which I recognized from the bus to Pieterburen yesterday. Later in the day, I saw several more. And outside of towns where the trail often followed concrete cycle paths, there were no shortage of cyclists.
The next town was Winsum, the largest town on the trail so far. Though the trail didn’t really spend much time in the town; just long enough to cross over the Winsumerdiep canal and turn back the other way.
Leaving Winsum, the trail zig-zagged around several fields, following concrete cycle paths, which my feet did not enjoy.
The fields were a mixture, with cow, horse, and pastures, besides the farmland.
Later, on the outskirts of Garnwerd, a house had an oversized doghouse, populated by a large, fat hog taking a nap.
For a while, the trail followed the Reitdeip, then crossed over it on a drawbridge. With a riverboat heading towards, I was not the least bit surprised when an alarm bell went off and the bridge’s crossing guards began to close immediately after I stepped off the bridge.
Over the course of the afternoon, the sun disappeared, covered by clouds, and the wind picked up. I picked a fortuitous time to put my pack cover on; the wind blew in a little bit of rain, though that didn’t last for very long. (Already, the weather had been much better than forecast, and if that was the only rain for the day, I was quite happy about that.)
The trail passed by a pair of picnic tables next to the bridge of a small ship, converted into a hut offering self-service tea, coffee, and sodas. It was a nice touch, and I might even have been tempted to get a soda there if I wasn’t trying to get to camp before it actually started raining.
A bit further on, I could see the tops of two sailboats (with their sails down, of course) and two other boats from across a field, traveling down the canal in the direction I came from.
A farmer was busy plowing that field, with a flock of sea gulls camped out wherever the tractor wasn’t, presumably looking for easy pickings in the churned-up soil.
I crossed the Reitdeip again, and saw the boat that went through the drawbridge behind me being tied up at a dock on the canal. Crossing the canal a third time brought almost to the end of my day.
Thanks to the Pieterpad’s website’s excellent list of places to stay along the trail, I’d arranged to set up my tent at “The Barn”, a self-developed nature reserve by Sophia and Jeroen, with camping available to Pieterpad hikers and cyclists. In my messages with Jeroen, he suggested that the grass in the camping area might be a bit tall, thanks to the recent rain, but I said it’d probably be fine. (I’ve camped in relatively tall grass before, so even if regularly mowed grass got a bit tall from the rain, it’d probably only be a minor nuisance.)
When I crossed the canal that third time, I saw someone on a riding mower on a property adjacent to the road I was following. I suspected (and later confirmed) that was Jeroen cutting the grass; apparently it’d gotten dry enough that he was able to cut the grass. I wasn’t expecting that, but it was a nice touch.
While he was cutting the grass, Sophia met me and showed me around, first to the freshly-mowed camping area, which could easily house a dozen tents, if not more; and then to the barn, which had a kitchen, private rooms, toilets and showers, and an art studio with some nice artwork on the walls. They also run a honesty bar, with not just drinks, but also food for cooking and snacks.
I got my tent set up, and got a shower, which is normally a luxury on a long trail, but here seems like it will be most nights.
As I was cooking dinner at the picnic table next to my tent, I saw one of the cats that live on the property.
The camping area is below a berm adjacent to the Reitdeip; a short trail leads over the berm and down the other side, to a dock that allows swimming access. That might be a nice thing on hotter days. On the other side of the canal, I could see other people walking and cycling — I’d been there not long earlier!
The forecast rain arrived later than expected, and mostly in intermittent bursts over the course of the evening. All in all, the weather today was much better than I expected, and hopefully tomorrow’s forecast is similarly pessimistic!