Heelweg crew.........drive/bike tour, Chalk quarry and surrounding areas, Winterswijk area.

Heelweg crew stuffed the Ebikes on the back of the car and shot East to Winterswijk, about 20 km drive.

Start of their adventure. Back yard, not our Peacocks, not our chooks and not our doves and not 'actually' our back yard past the green grass.

Easy to load two bikes on hitch mount on the car. (winter photo, no leaves)

Marjolein first researches the area and plots a route on the bike paths.

This is an old chalk/lime quarry, very interesting.

Titbits:-

(Winterswijk quarry is an open-cast mine of un-Dutch proportions where lime is extracted on a large scale. This lime originated in the Triassic, 240 million years ago. The quarry is known for fossils, ranging from shells to bone remains and footprints of saurians and different types of minerals.

Muschelkalk Sea

The limestone quarry is located just east of Winterswijk. The slab of limestone lies on the surface and is three kilometers long, one kilometer wide and forty meters thick. It was once the bottom of an inland sea: the Muschelkalk Sea. Marine and terrestrial animals left their traces in the silt in the lagoons of that sea. Layer after layer, the remains accumulated and are the limestone of today. It is unique for this part of the Netherlands that the limestone lies on the surface.

Quarries

The Winterswijk quarry covers 27 hectares and consists of three quarries. Quarry I is in-active. Quarry II is owned by the Dutch forrest administration. Lime is only extracted in Quarry III.).

Lime is a calcium-containing inorganic mineral composed primarily of oxides, and hydroxide, usually calcium oxide and/ or calcium hydroxide. It is also the name for calcium oxide which occurs as a product of coal-seam fires and in altered limestone xenoliths in volcanic ejecta.^[1] The word lime originates with its earliest use as building mortar and has the sense of sticking or adhering.^[2]

Limestone quarry

These materials are still used in large quantities as building and engineering materials (including limestone products, cement, concrete, and mortar), as chemical feedstocks, and for sugar refining, among other uses. Lime industries and the use of many of the resulting products date from prehistoric times in both the Old World and the New World. Lime is used extensively for wastewater treatment with ferrous sulfate.

The rocks and minerals from which these materials are derived, typically limestone or chalk, are composed primarily of calcium carbonate. They may be cut, crushed, or pulverized and chemically altered. Burning (calcination) of these minerals in a lime kiln converts them into the highly caustic material burnt lime, unslaked lime or quicklime (calcium oxide) and, through subsequent addition of water, into the less caustic (but still strongly alkaline) slaked lime or hydrated lime (calcium hydroxide, Ca(OH)₂), the process of which is called slaking of lime.

When the term is encountered in an agricultural context, it usually refers to agricultural lime, which today is usually crushed limestone, not a product of a lime kiln. Otherwise it most commonly means slaked lime, as the more dangerous form is usually described more specifically as quicklime or burnt lime.