Huge Ride (but just one, thank you)

So Saturday I did the north side of Flevoland, the huge artificial island where the Zuider Zee used to be. You can see the map -->HERE<--. By custom, this ride is in red, previous rides in black.

Whence...WHEW! This 69 kilometer ride turned out to be 100 km. I had planned to follow the dikes around the west and north perimeters, but more than half the length was closed for repairs. Which explains the tortuous path on the map, and the blood pooling in my poor legs. By the way: there was no Sunday ride.

I rode the train to Almere and launched northbound in fog. I had no sooner reached the Oostervaartdijk than a sign turned me back...all the way back to the train line. I rode along the train line until I could work my way back to the shoreline in the next city, Lelystad. Again, I had to pedal UP out of the island's interior to get to the sea, at sea level. And it's amazing: these new, newly named cities have no history at all. The only history is imported (very old boats floating in a very new harbor) or just fake (like Lelystad's hilarious Batavia Stad shopping center, complete with fake guns pointing out of fake brick fortress walls at the parking lot). But I found a nice lunch spot, on Lelystad's north side (pictured).
 

And yes, Lelystad is obviously prosperous, though I can't imagine what these people do in this city in the middle of nowhere.
 

OK, one thing they do is make electrical power. Lots of it. By wind and (in the distance) with the gigantic Flevo Central power station, which is not "central" to anything. They do send some of this power to small towns in the area, but I didn't see any lines to Lelystad. They need all that power right here. For what? Because if power production sags for any length of time, the pumps stop, and the canals fill, water rises through the homes' floors and around all those cows' ankles. It's still the windmills against Nature, it just looks a little different.
 

And it goes on, and on and on, for kilometer after kilometer, around the long northwestern curve of the island.
 

The map tells the whole story. It was hot. I got sunburned, especially riding southward and into the wind away from the north dike. They fooled me twice, costing me hours and costing me the energy I would need for my Sunday ride.

The last thing I expected was a glorious finish to the long ride, but the town of Kampen delivered. Into the nearly medieval town, church bells playing crazily and echoing through the narrow brick streets, and across the glorious bridge over the River IJssel. A climax with soundtrack worthy of Hollywood, but better: very real. If I hadn't needed to lean on my bike to stand up, and if I hadn't been far too dehydrated for it, I might have burst into tears. Hard to get to as Kampen is, I will revisit. Wow.