Over the past hundred years, the province of Friesland has hosted a grueling and heroic ice skating race when the winters are harsh enough to freeze the canals, named the Elfstedentocht, or the Eleven Cities Tour. Calling them "cities" is not really dependent upon their population, so much as hundreds of years ago having filled out the appropriate paperwork to be deemed a city, and therefore many of them are really just towns. Nice towns, to be sure, but towns all the same. These eleven cities lie along such a nice route in Friesland that doing the tour is not just limited to sternly skating people, and all other modes of transportation have gotten in on the action throughout the year. There are sailing races, car races, and yesterday, the most ubiquitous Dutch way to get around, the bike Eleven Cities Tour. There were 30 cyclists riding to raise money for Amnesty International, and as a volunteer I got to spend the beautiful day in Bolsward with several other Amnesty workers, gathering (in my case, only a couple) of signatures and taking lots of photos of this endless stream of 15,000 cyclists.
