T A B L E_T A L K Bed and breakfast places: Do you love 'em or hate 'em? Join the debate in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Waiting for Hurricane Georges By Jennifer Moses Preparing for disaster in Baton Rouge (10/13/98) Under the moon at Angkor Thom By Karin Muller An idyllic picnic is interrupted by soldiers (10/11/98) Seduced by Kenya By Don George An interview with author Francesca Marciano about Africa's attractions and contradictions (10/09/98) This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news (10/09/98) Rules of the Wild By Francesca Marciano The seductive subculture of whites in Kenya -- and the addicting allure of Africa's vastness (10/08/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		-------------A vacationing family finds pleasure --------and peril among a nation of bicyclers. BY CYNTHIA GORNEY | The plan: Holland, children, bicycles. We figured the rest would evolve on its own. "Flat," my husband said. "The whole country is flat. Bike paths all over the place." A landscape materialized at once in my head. You can imagine the particulars: windmill, tulips, cow, canal, pedaling 12- and 16-year-old. Sunshine. Waving farmer. Cheese. "Legal weed," the 16-year-old chipped in. "Not for you," I said. We bought a Holland guidebook, with many photographs of Rembrandt paintings and elaborately gabled canal-front brick houses, but the Bicycles section was only two pages long and commenced with a photograph of a bike helmet. Ha! (We'll get to that in a moment.) We found what seemed to be a suitable Holland Tourist Board Web site, animated on-screen by a little mustached man who pedaled along as you plotted out various rural cycling routes, but every time I tried to download the maps my computer snarled at me and dumped the site. So we gave up on the advance details, arranged for an Amsterdam apartment that came equipped with the owners' bicycles and landed on a breezy July morning at Schiphol Airport, which is grand and clean and extremely efficient; by lunch time, our bags piled up at the top of the apartment's staircase landing, we were bicycling. Before sundown the next day, we had grasped the essentials. The essentials were -- startling. By that second day, I had began composing my own introductory bicycling brochure, to be handed at the border to uninitiated Americans with tulips in their heads. "Bicycling in Holland: The Essentials" 1. The Bicycles. The bicycles are hardy. Black, mostly, or faded gray. No gearshifts. Rust on the fenders. High handlebars. Smooth fat tires. Coaster brakes. When you hit the cobblestones, things rattle; the bell dings of its own accord; small parts fall off and have to be jammed back into place. The bicycle you learned to ride on felt like this. At the central Amsterdam train station the outside walls are ringed by vast thickets of rusting dark metal, bicycle after bicycle locked in tight succession along the long metal parking racks, and at the fringes of the racks, scores of spillover bicycles are locked to fence posts, lampposts, grillwork, tree trunks, drainpipes and each other. Some of these bicycles are lying at peculiar angles and appear to have been stripped of seats, fenders, pedals or front wheels. There are locked bicycles rusting together in front of every restaurant, storefront, apartment house and playground; any fixed outdoor metal tubing, regardless of its intended purpose, is likely to have a bicycle locked to it. Fietsenstalling means bicycle parking. Fietsenstalling with a red line slashed through it means: For God's sake, give me a break, just put the damn thing somewhere else. 2. The Terrain. In Holland the intersections have three sets of traffic signals: lighted spheres for the automobiles, lighted walking men for the pedestrians and lighted bicycles for you -- red two-wheeler for stop, green two-wheeler for go. On many streets you get your own lane, too, with its own yellow line center divider. This would make your inaugural bicycle ride, which will almost certainly take place in Amsterdam, quite charming and tranquil except for the motorcycles and the buses and the delivery trucks and the map-reading tourists and the honking Minis and Fiats (which look like those tiny cars from the Richard Scarry children's books and drive very rapidly down brick-paved streets, with three centimeters of clearance on either side) and the horse-drawn calliope wagons and the ambulances going beeee-booop-beeee-booop and the lollipop-colored streetcars bearing down on you broadside. There are windmills, by the way. Also farmers and cows, and drowsy sheep, and dawn mist off the still canals, and thick green meadows out to the flat horizon. But you have to bicycle through Amsterdam to get to them. 3. The Road Company. The population of Holland is 16 million; the total number of bicycles, according to official counts, is slightly over 16 million. More than one bicycle per citizen, that is, including the newborn and the infirm. While you are on your bicycle you will be overtaken by the following persons, all of whom will pedal more aggressively than you and will clang their handlebar bells impatiently to shoo you over to the right: leggy blond women in miniskirts and four-inch platform shoes; businessmen in pressed white shirts and ties; teenage boys with girlfriends balancing sidesaddle on the back; teenage girls with boyfriends balancing splayed-legged over the handlebars; pale Turkish grocers carrying full crates of bottled beer; coffee-colored Indonesian women carrying full sacks of market vegetables; black boys in soccer jerseys arguing furiously in Dutch; elderly white-haired men with their wool trousers tucked into their socks; elderly white-haired women with long-stemmed gladioluses pinioned under one arm; Orthodox Jewish boys in yarmulkes; Islamic ladies in chadors; and a 300-pound tattooed man, bare-chested under his denim overalls, with one child on his handlebars and another clinging to him from behind. Note: None of these people will be wearing a helmet. N E X T+P A G E | Rain? No problem