Greenwich Mean Time at the Piccadilly Circus. In 1997 we did start at the Arc de Triomphe for Paris-Eindhoven. We figured the rest would evolve on its own. The whole country is flat.
Bike paths all over the place.
A landscape materialized at once in my head. 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. 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. Before sundown the next day, we had grasped the essentials. 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.