Pelotome –
around the Netherlands on a bicycle.
“A great crowd of clerks, piermasters, labourers and sailors, who had learned that I was bound on the wheel for Geneva – an enormous distance in the eyes of Dutchmen, whose whole country is only about one hundred miles by one hundred, and who never stir from home unless they can get a ship or a train or a carriage to convey them – saw me start from the ship’s side, but their sluggish Dutch temper could not fire enough to give me a parting cheer.”
~ Wanderings: On Wheel and On Foot in Europe – Hugh Callan (1887).
My Life and Times
by Jerome K. Jerome
From £4,75
1874
Bicycling; Its Rise and Development.
“A text book for riders” aimed to cater for the rapidly developing bicycle movement by filling the void, after early books about the wooden wheeled machine had become valueless. With numerous illustrations to assist the beginner, the book is packed with informative chapters on routes in England, Ireland, Scotland, Switzerland, The Battlefields of 1870, Upper Rhine, Belgium, Germany, Holland, and France – each highlighting the points of interest, hotels, museums, mileage, gradients and road conditions along the way,
The two routes of the Netherlands are from Rotterdam to the Hague, and the Hague to Amsterdam.
- Published by Tinsley Bros., London.
July 1885 – Published October 1887.
Wanderings: On Wheel and On Foot in Europe.
Part Two of Glaswegian Hugh Callan’s book is dedicated to his July 1885 trip from Carlisle to Hull, and 1,100 miles “on wheel up the Rhine Valley, from Amsterdam to Geneva, and back by Antwerp,” occupying 23 days, and passing through Utrecht – “where canals and highroads, and the Vecht and the Old Rhine are perplexingly intertwined,” he “had the utmost difficulty in finding the road to the frontier,” before finally finding his way to Arnhem and onward through Germany.
The main subject for the book however is his July 1886, 1,500 mile, 33 day journey “on wheel down Europe from the German ocean to the Aegean Sea”, (Hamburg to Athens) on a Singer “British Challenge” high-wheeler, while Part Three follows his six week walking tour “‘on the tramp’ in Belgium and France,” in 1881.
- By Hugh Callan.
- Published by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, London.
May 1889 – Published 1890.
Round About The World on Bicycles.
“The pleasure tour of G.W. Burston and H.R. Stokes, Melbourne Bicycle Club, Australia,” follows George Burston and Harry Stokes on their 56-inch high-wheel bicycle journey around the world, setting off from Melbourne, on 1st November 1888, arriving back in Australia on the 14th December 1889.
The Dutch section of their journey was chronicled in The Australasian, on 8th or 15th February 1890,
Entering Holland on their “trusty iron horses” from Kleve in Germany (presumably at Kranenburg), they visited Oss and Gorinchem on their way to Rotterdam, where they caught a steamer to London, noting that “there is no mistaking Dutch roads, for they are bricked in a peculiar manner, not altogether satisfactory to the wheelman,”
- “by G.W. Burston and H.R. Stokes.
- Published by George Robertson and Company, Melbourne, Australia “for private circulation only”
August 1890 – Published 1891.
Wheel Tracks in Foreign Lands.
“Recollections of a cycling tour through Europe during the summer of 1890” followed twenty riders of the “Elwell American Bicycle Party” on their safety bicycles as they peddled 1,500 miles around France, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and England.
Arriving in Rotterdam on a train from Düsseldorf, they cycled to Delft, The Hague, and “the Queen’s ‘Palace in the Wood’,” (Huis ten Bosch), before returning to Rotterdam where they caught a steamer to Harwich, England.
- by James E. Wilkinson.
- Published by Hanzsche & Co., Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.
June 1891 – Published in 1892.
The Brownies in “Yurep”.
“Or, cycling beyond the sea” is an incredibly rare book, with only 32 copies ever printed. It follows the “Members of the Elwell Bicycle Tour of 1891” on their ride in Europe with “Papa” Elwell, complete with photographs, from England, “touring through sunny France, mid Switzerland’s snow-clad peaks and lakes of blue, and down the fabled Rhine” through Germany and Holland – the same guided tour taken by James E. Wilkinson in “Wheel Tracks in Foreign Lands” a year earlier.
- by Charles R. Cutter and F. R. Goodrich.
- published by Telegram Book Print, Youngstown, Ohio, U.S.A..
- (advert for Elwell’s Tour of 1891 in Life, 2nd April 1891).
WANDERINGS ON WHEEL AND ON FOOT
“Nowhere do such clouds of smoke ascend as incense to the great Unnamed but constantly worshipped modern god of Tobacco as in this city on the waters.
No doubt the moist atmosphere tends to preserve for the Dutch their proverbial pre-eminence in this worship. The ‘weed’ is grown in the country, and cigars sell at a trifle.
Nowhere is the practice regarded as so venial a fault on the part of the young.
Near the Palace in the Dam square, when passing through an alley, I remarked a family seated on the raised stone pavement; all except the females were puffing vigorously at their pipes or cigars ; but my staring surprise at beholding two youngsters of very tender years gravely and serenely doing their duty towards big fat cigars as long as their face, right under the nose of papa and mamma, was too much for the gravity even of Dutchmen.”
~ Wanderings on Wheel and on Foot, Hugh Callan (1887).