Reserve an eight night Friesland lakes trip, village to village by boat and bicycle

Reserve an eight night Friesland lakes trip and what you are reserving is the frame, not the days inside it. Five towns in the north of the Netherlands, a room held in each, six days of bicycles, the boat legs across three lakes, and no one standing beside you at any point in the week. The province is water. Between Sneek and Stavoren there is more of it than there is land, in lakes two to four meters deep, and every village on this route grew up where a canal met a road.

Friesland is not a place you go to look at one thing. There is no mountain in it, no gorge, no ruin anybody crosses an ocean for. What it has is a hundred kilometers of connected water inside a province you could ride across in a long day, eleven old towns strung along that water, and a farmed countryside that still mows to a bird's calendar rather than a machine's.

Which rung you take changes the week more than the map does. This one sits in the middle of the chain.

Arranged and unaccompanied means the beds, the tickets, the boats and the entries are settled weeks before you land, and then nothing else is. No one calls your room at seven. No one counts heads. If you decide over breakfast in Hindeloopen to spend the whole day on a bench by the harbor instead of riding to Workum, the only consequence is that your bag arrives before you do.

Water that reaches every back door

The lakes here are not scenery held at a distance. In IJlst the houses along the main canal keep their gardens on the far bank and cross to them on private wooden footbridges, one per house, about forty of them in a row. In Sloten the canal runs down the middle of the single street and the whole town takes twenty five minutes to walk around. Sneek's water gate, two brick towers standing over the canal since 1613, was how you entered the town if you arrived by water, and boats still come through under it on a summer afternoon at the rate of one every few minutes.

Depth explains most of what the week feels like. The Sneekermeer averages a little over two meters and the Slotermeer about the same, so the water is warm enough to swim in from late June and cold enough in May to change your mind on the ladder. Shallow water also means reed, cut in winter and left standing all summer, and the reed edges are where the meadow birds are. Black tailed godwits come back to the wet fields in the third week of March, and on a good many farms the first cut is held off until the chicks can fly in the middle of June, which is why the grass in early June is knee high and full of noise.

The five towns and the bed in each

Sneek holds the first two nights, in a twenty two room hotel on the market square with a bar downstairs that stops serving food at half past nine. Woudsend is one night in a six room guesthouse where dinner is at seven or not at all, and the owner asks at breakfast whether you want it. Sloten is one night in four rooms above a cafe, and after the last boat pulls out at ten past six the street goes quiet enough to hear the mill turning. Hindeloopen takes two nights in a nine room house two streets back from the small harbor, in a town of about eight hundred and seventy people that kept its own dialect and its own painted furniture and shows the second of those, along with the town's skating history, in one museum. Workum finishes with two nights in a fourteen room hotel on a main street nine hundred meters long, lined with houses whose gables carry the year they went up, most of them between 1650 and 1740.

The wind is the only hill

There is no gradient in this province worth a gear change. The route sits between roughly one meter below sea level and two above it, and the steepest thing you climb in eight days is the approach to a bascule bridge, about four meters of rise over eighty. What stands in for the hill is the wind. It comes out of the southwest on something close to half the days of the year, averages around four and a half meters a second at Leeuwarden, and arrives with nothing in the way at all on the dike north of Stavoren. Riding into thirty kilometers an hour of it for eleven kilometers is the hardest hour of the week, and it is the reason the route runs south to north on day five rather than the other way.

Rain is the other thing to plan around. The province takes around eight hundred millimeters a year spread across a great many days, which in June usually means rain on three or four days out of seven, falling for forty minutes at a time rather than all morning. The bridges make up for it. Where a canal is too wide to lift a road over, the road goes under it instead, through a tiled aqueduct that drops you eight meters and returns you to daylight with barges passing overhead. At the small ones the keeper opens the cabin window and lowers the clog on its line, and the toll goes in while the traffic waits behind you.

Holding five rooms in one week

Five houses of four to twenty two rooms fill in a particular order. The first full week of August is regatta week in Sneek and every room in the town is committed to it, so that week is not offered here at all. The barge racing that runs on eleven afternoons between the middle of July and the start of August takes Woudsend and Sloten the same way, because the flat bottomed cargo barges that race belong to these villages and the villages empty onto the banks to watch them. Ask for the last week of May, the second week of June or the first half of September and five rooms in five towns can usually be lined up in one pass.

Nothing on this page belongs to Pine Gazette Bookings LLC. Not a room, not a hull, not a bicycle, not a seat on anything that flies. The Pine Gazette is the name Pine Gazette Bookings LLC, a limited liability company of Louisiana, works under from 2450 Severn Avenue, Suite 312, Metairie, 70001, and what this office does is reserve the week with the company that actually runs it. That company then invoices you itself, in its own name and on its own paperwork, on the terms it prints there. No money of any kind is taken here, at any stage.

Getting yourself to the Netherlands is your own arrangement, and no flight is held, booked or arranged by this office. The boat legs across the Sneekermeer, the Heegermeer and the Slotermeer are run by the companies holding the licenses for those routes, they carry you under those licenses, and the fare for them sits on the operating company's invoice rather than anywhere on this page.

Send your dates to bookings@thepinegazette.com, or reach the office in New Orleans, LA on +1 (504) 832-6194. A written figure against your own dates comes back inside two to four working days, because each of the five houses answers separately and two of them answer only in the morning. If a distance, a depth or an opening hour on this page has gone wrong, write to corrections@thepinegazette.com and it will be corrected.