Scenes in Utrecht:
one of the old canals,
an architect's humor - the "rope" is actually part of the stone,
and I am relaxing in the cloister of the church.
One day we took the bus in the opposite direction of downtown Utrecht to the university campus. This is not your typical "campus" with a main building and grounds with lots of grass. This university is almost like a town, with lots of tall buildings that were either libraries, classrooms or labs, student housing, etc. The guidebook told us that several well known Dutch architects had designed many of these buildings. We went into one of them: the Rem Koolhaus building that was an arts building, with theater, art spaces and a cafe area.
Since it was really the summer break there were not that many people around. I can just imagine how crazy it is when all of the students are here, riding their bikes. In the meantime, we thought the university is a bit cold, since we were used to a traditional university campus. Just a bunch of tall buildings, quite far apart from each other. It is probably convenient to the students who spend the entire day in one building, but it just doesn't look like a community.
Every night at 6:00 we would gather in the garden, near the canal, and have a glass of wine with Marc, the hotel owner. It was such a nice touch, and we enjoyed getting to know Marc and other people who were staying at the hotel. During the conversations, I said something about riding bikes and how it would be to ride around the town - how it would feel to get back on a bike. Marc said he had a couple of bikes we could use. Jack wasn't interested, but I thought it would be fun, so one morning, while Jack was still sleeping, I sneaked downstairs, unlocked the bike, and made my way around the neighborhood. I wanted to go out in the morning because people of Holland just don't get started until after ten in the mornings, so I thought I would have the streets to myself.
Oh my gosh, don't ever believe that 40 years later you can hop on a bike and take off. At least, it wasn't that easy for me. Fortunately, it was the kind of bike where the brakes were in the pedals, not the handles. I learned on such a bike as a kid, so I was more comfortable with that method now. But it seemed that the bike was so fast and I was so high up on the seat. I don't know, it was just weird and I was so glad I didn't meet anyone during my half hour of biking around the neigborhood.
I wasn't sure if I wanted to do that again, but Marc persuaded me to try again on Saturday morning; nobody would be out early and it would be cool and nice wide streets with no other travelers. I did try it and got a little more used to it. I traveled much farther away from our hotel and felt pretty good. Maybe if I practiced everyday I would get more confident and then actually be able to get out on the road with other bikers and cars and busses. Maybe.
Jack and I spent a whole day working on the next six weeks of our itinerary. He does the reading and research, figures out where we should stay and makes an educated guess on how long to stay at each place. I get on the computer and try to find hotels in the towns he has chosen. I am sure there are hundreds of web sites that I could use to find places to stay, but I have had good luck with two: Venere.com and Booking.com. They are easy to use, the hotels have descriptions and photos of their rooms; they have reviews from people who have stayed at the hotels. and above all, you can book online and get confirmation immediately. We have had to resort to other methods in the past, and they are very inconvenient: you have to email the hotel and wait a few days for confirmation or no, or you have to call the place and try to talk to them. All of that is too complicated; I would rather be able to handle everything online and be done with it.
I had no trouble with the first three places in Germanhy we were staying, but the hotels in Berlin turned out to be very expensive. We were going to stay several weeks there, and most hotels I was interested in could not take us for that length of time. I had to break up our stay to sets of two weeks at a time. We will see how that works. Getting to stay in a place for a long time is nice, so we are not packing and unpacking; however, in a large place like Berlin it might be nice to learn different neighborhoods. We will see.
We were ready to move onto Arnhem in a few days. It is located on the border with Germany and very far inland from the North Sea. Not many people we met had much to say about Arnhem, but we were anxious to get there. One of our favorite movies was "A Bridge Too Far", the story of a huge Allied military operation in September, 1944, which was to end the war if it was successful. However, many things happened to make the plan fail, and we had always wanted to travel the road in Holland where the action happened. We were ready to follow the story.
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