Week 56: Memorial Day Weekend Roadtrip

For Memorial Day Weekend, we headed north. Our first stop was in Brussels, Belgium. Brussels is the capital of Belgium and also home to much of the management of the European Union. We made only a short stop in Brussels, primarily to see the Grand Place, which is a large city square surrounded by the city hall and old guild halls.

The Town Hall from Brussels's Grand Place

From there, we drove toward the Belgian coast and Bruges. Bruges has a large number of canals and buildings that are 100s of years old--most of its medieval buildings are still intact. We spent the evening wandering around the city and found an Italian restaurant for dinner. One thing that was very interesting about Bruges, as opposed to other cities we have been to in Europe, was that the train station was located about a 15 minute walk from the downtown. The city encourages people to park at the train station and take the bus into the town, by giving you free bus fare with your parking ticket. Not bad at all, as it looked pretty impossible to park on the narrow, cobblestoned roads.

A canal in Bruge

Much like New Hampshire, Belgium is quite proud of its diminutive coastline along the Atlantic Ocean. It stretches about 42 miles between France and the Netherlands, with the coast of England only about 84 miles away. We quickly visited the cost north of Bruges, where a ferry brings over UK tourists for a trip to the beach. As you can see, the beach is pretty enormous. We were there at the start of the season, so while there were a number of people relaxing in beach chairs, there wasn't the dense crowds that would be likely later in the summer.

Beach in Belgium

From the Belgian coast, we drove up to The Netherlands, staying on the coast for a bit and even running into a jazz festival in one of the small towns we drove through, where we stopped to have fish, fries and ice cream. Belgium is where fries were invented. They do a sort of double-frying of the potatoes, which results in a fantastically crispy fry. Yum!

Rainbow Over Netherlands

From the coast, we worked our way inland to Grave, Netherlands. We discovered that this area was the focus of Operation Market Garden, during World War II and the bridge featured in A Bridge Too Far, was located only a few miles from where we stayed. We stayed on the edge of Grave and spent the next day and a half riding our bikes around the wonderfully flat Netherlands.

Hey! We found a castle!

The weather was fantastic, so we did a multi-hour ride each on Sunday and Monday. On each day, we spent some time riding along canals and, also, on each day, took a ferry across so we could do a nice loop. We had plenty of company, including roving bands of bikers with matching bikes and uniforms speeding along with skinny tires and tight spandex.

Bike Ferry Across a Canal

Unfortunately, all vacations, and especially short ones, come to an end. On our way home, though, we hit another triple point. Our last triple point was between Luxembourg, Germany and Belgium. This time, it was between Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. This site was a bit more developed than the first and included a number of playgrounds, amusement rides, places to drink coffee and towers to climb to the top of. Part of the attraction was that this spot is not only a triple point, but is also the highest spot in The Netherlands. This point is at 322 meters, just over 100 meters higher than the highest point in Rhode Island.

Just guess which of the 3 countries I am in...

Week 47: Short Vacation to the Netherlands

A few months ago, we had marked some time off on our calendar to attend the wedding of one of Jason's cousins. Unfortunately, due to our realization that we would spend almost as much time travelling as we would on the ground, we decided that it wouldn't make sense to take the trip. We were left with time off on our calendar. After investigating some last-minute package tours and other options that required ass-early flights, we found a lovely little B&B in the Netherlands (link in Dutch), where we could spend time relaxing and riding our bikes.

The livingroom in our B&B apartment

The drive was about 5 hours from our place to Waspe, where the B&B is located. The area was very nice and surrounded by farms and parkland. (Mom--you would love it! There were horses everywhere. We saw at least two people driving as well.) On our drive in, we followed a canal for much of the way. We had arranged ahead of time to have our hostess prepare dinner for us, which was fantastic and much easier than trying to find a place to eat after our long drive.

We spent our first day out on our bikes. The weather was really nice--sunny, but still a little cool. As you may know, the Dutch are crazy for biking and as we were sitting in our room in the morning, we saw students headed to school and a string of adults headed to work all on bicycles. And the only time the Dutch are seen wearing helmets while biking is if they are on the crazy road bikes with the skinny tires that require you to wear spandex and clippy shoes.

From our B&B, we headed out into the nearby Drents-Friese Wold (a wooded parkland--north of Waspe, if you follow the link to the map above) and rode our bikes to the town of Appelscha, where we had lunch. Jason had the opportunity to experience Dutch noontime cuisine (I've had it a number of times at the companies I've visited in the Netherlands), which consists either of fried croquettes of some type or hot open face sandwiches with cheese and fried eggs. He had the first. I had the latter. His impression: "So good." And once again, we were struck by the fact that really, here in Northern Europe they don't eat that much better than we do--they just seem to spend much more time moving around--or something--to stay generally not-obese.

One interesting thing we noticed as we were riding around is than an inordinate number of roads in this area of the Netherlands were brick. It wasn't like you normally see in Europe, where the roads in the center of town or where people walk were paved with brick. These were all the secondary roads, both in town and outside of it. And in almost all cases that we ran into, even in the more remote farming areas, they were in very good repair.

A sample of the brick roads

After a great day our on our bikes, we found a BBQ joint that was a short drive away. It had all the trappings of your standard BBQ joint in the US, as you can see from the photo below--hats, wagon wheels, barrels, etc. The waiters even had holsters with toy guns in them. I hadn't eaten ribs in ages, so I ordered those and Jason ordered a steak. The ribs were a mistake--they were very odd tasting. It took me a while, but I finally realized what the flavor was--Chinese spareribs. Like you get at that crappy Chinese place that you go to only because it is close, not because it is good. Jason, though, enjoyed his steak, and frankly, the atmosphere in the place was quite amusing, almost making up for the abominable ribs.

Howdy, partner! 

For our second full day, we  drove up to Groningen (pronounced "Hrone-ing-gen"), which is the nearest city to where we were staying. We had lunch in the city, which, like much of the rest of the Netherlands, was full of canals and wandered through the town a bit. Our main destination in Groningen, though was a climbing gym located on the edge of the city. The most notable feature of this gym is shown in the picture below: the highest dedicated climbing structure in the world. It could only be used if you were lead climbing (something Jason and I are currently not qualified to do), but was still quite impressive to see.

For scale, Jason is with the car on the right-hand side of the photo

For our last full day, we went out for another bike ride, this time to the town of Dwingeloo and the Dwingelerweld park land. The best thing about biking in the Netherlands is that there are no hills. None. Maybe an occasional bump for a bridge or a local depression, but no steep valleys or tall hills to be seen.

Lunch in Dwingeloo--Go Sox!

In riding through the parkland near Dwingeloo, we found the radio telescope in the below picture. This is my second time having my photo taken with a radio telescope. The first time was about 15 years ago at Nerd Camp, where my future college roommate took a picture of me in front of a much larger radio telescope located in West Virginia. I suppose I now need to make my way to the largest radio telescope in the world, located in Puerto Rico.

Me and a radio telescope!

Our vacation ended with a 5 hour drive home. All too short, as vacations inevitably are, but a very enjoyable time while it lasted.