Holland , Easter and ferry etiquette as a bike traveller

Arriving in Holland Easter Monday via the Harwich / Hoek crossing by bike.

It’s been 30+ years since I last crossed with bike only and first time for me in EU post Brexit restrictions kicking in.

We are taking effectively a camping setup without tents & stove (have a little hut booked with beds and a cooker but nothing else).

ferry

I am planning to take the luggage up to the cabin but is there anything that should remain with the bikes?  E.g. cooking and food prep stuff  + our little brukit if we take it.

Lock bikes on/to ferry?

food stuffs

Obviously more restrictive post Brexit.

Just want something to bridge any problems with shopping on Monday.

Looks like bread etc is OK, cannot see any restriction on bringing things like a pot of jam, some prepacked noodles, olive oil, salt, pepper etc.

Is that understanding right? At a simple level no meat, no dairy, no fresh fruit and veg a safe basis.

easter Monday

Any ideas what will be open?  Is Holland on shutdown (I know I should have thought about this before booking 😂) but excitement got the better of me.

If from my stupid questions you think I’ve forgotten anything do tell me 😄

I can’t imagine anyone would take anything from your bike as everyone still has to go through customs and passport control so they can’t run very fast, locking it should be ok. There’s quite a few flights of stairs if you want to carry all your luggage to the room. You can usually use the lift going up but there will be an enormous queue in the morning as everyone is trying to go down at the same time.
I’ve not seen anyone getting searched for food items, I’ve only ever been asked about the amount of alcohol I’m carrying (like I’d bring English beer to NL…) but might be different for cyclists.

When we got the ferry to Holland with the car we weren’t even stopped to ask what we had with us. Provided you don’t feed diseased ham sandwiches to farm animals or wildlife there are few issues.

Everyone (well a lot of people) take their own food to eat on the boat. Lidl near the ferry port in Ijumiden sold passable salads.

Just don’t set the fire alarm off in your cabin when cooking. Maybe use the sun deck.

Yeah take a picnic for the boat.
We bought beers too.

When we went back to the UK at Christmas I (paranoidly) took my bike off the rack and put it in the car. Then my wife pointed at all the bikes locked up in the storage area.

Regarding food, I have never been asked or checked, even carrying a kg of bacon through the airport.

The funniest thing now is that they breathalyse most ferries docking in Rotterdam. So you see the queue form, people realise they will be tested and a large proportion of cars swap driver/passenger 🤣

Yes last time we used the Rotterdam ferry I was briefly excited to see a change from 10 years of no choice but Marstons Pedigree, only to see the new IPA they were offering was about 6.5% on a ferry where a lot of people would be driving the next morning…..

There are a lot of crew bikes at the back of Pride of Rotterdam car deck and don’t think many of them were locked.

We went to hoek of holland at christmas in camper, the dutch police asked us to open van for them to look, but they did not actually check anything at all inside the van.

There is a Lidl just around the corner from the ferry terminal.

No need to bother about anything re food. Last time I drove we had all the detritus of a 12 HR drive spread across the front seats. Zero FS given. Similarly I didn’t bother locking the bike or removing any unneeded luggage the time before.

Thanks all.  Really looking forward to a car free trip (let’s ignore the driving to near Harwich bit).

+1 for being breathalysed. I’ve been tested both in Ijmuiden and Rotterdam before passport control.

DFDS are very intolerant of picnicking in any of the seating areas – particularly if you’re seen consuming your own alcohol.

AFTER TRIP UPDATE

Thanks to all who contributed above and on the couple of other threads.  I thought I’d leave a few comments on how we found things in case they help someone else.

We went for 5 days via the Harwich / Hoek van Holland route taking the night boat both ways and getting a lift to near the port from Harwich.

Leaving Harwich

The Morrisons petrol station or supermarket car park was a handy place to unload bikes.  There’s also a McDonald’s and Greggs nearby.

While the port info says use the cycle route we just cycled straight down the road.  Although the road is large it’s a 30 and we found people generally were not going faster.

There is no cycle lane provision to the booths so you need to queue up but we did skip round the main boarding queue on the port staff instructions.

You have to ride up and over the spiral ramp. Low gear!

We left all our luggage on the bikes but in common with others the bikes were locked.

We had loads of time to faff about.

Arrival at Hoek

We got off fairly early.  Dutch side was slow and had to queue with the main traffic.

Straight out onto the cycle paths.

Coming back

Pretty much the reverse although we found the Dutch check in quite slow (not the first time we’ve thought it seemed to be slower that side) and we had to queue with all the cars so when British (always) drivers decide to leave their stinking 4*4 idling for an hour that’s less pleasant.

On a future trip I would arrive a bit later and aim to go straight on as we were ahead of check in opening so ended up stood around for a bit.

To save pannier faff with overnight stuff we put a few things in a dry bag and bungee’d it to the top of the rack for the boat.

The supermarkets were open on the Monday too.

We had a great trip even though the miles count was way down compared to plan due to the weather. 🙂