Fall 2007 - Northwestern College

Alumniprofile
Northwestern Classic
Netherlands Bike Tour
Fluent in Friesland
(and Other Fantasies)
by Sara Veldhuizen Stealy ’98
“If you want me to do the bike tour with you, you’re
going to train this time.”
My husband, the triathlete, looked skeptically at me, the
couch potato. We were both thinking of the same number:
26. The exact number of miles I rode my bike in preparation
for the Northwestern Alumni Association’s 250-mile
Netherlands Bike Tour in 2001.
But this time would be different. Train I did, physically
and linguistically. Seven months later, on a Friday evening, we
boarded our flight to the Netherlands. I had garnered 250
training miles and the ability to say, in semi-coherent Dutch,
that Haarlem is the capital of North Holland.
I reassured myself this would be just as useful, if not
more useful, than knowing how to say, “How are you?” a
Sara Veldhuizen Stealy and her mother, Marsha, participated in their second NWC Netherlands Bike Tour this summer. They were joined this year by Sara’s husband, Dave.
28 ▲ Fall 2007