The World Beyond BetterMost > Anything Goes
When I say Holland....
Andrew:
I don't suppose you got to the Hoge Veluwe National Park when you were in Arnhem, David? That is one of my finest memories of the Netherlands.
I was there in May of 1999; in May it was still staying light until about 10:30 at night. We arrived by foot, late - maybe at 6:00 in the afternoon. We had spent the day at Het Loo. We had been staying three nights at the other end of the park from Arnhem, at the Carnegie Cottage near Otterloo. We kept meaning to get to the national park proper, but right across from the inn was a path going into an adjacent very wild and large local park, and day after day we let ourselves be sucked down that inviting path, which we could look out over from our windows under the high cottage gable.
This was the last night before the morning we were scheduled to leave, so it was our last chance to see the national park, the official Tourist Destination of this part of our itinerary. We walked over from the inn. On the road just before the entrance there was a backyard filled with every imaginable domestic and small exotic animal. When they saw us they charged the fence en masse -- clearly used to being fed by other visitors. There is something so memorable about being charged by a rabbit.
We knew the Kroller-Muller museum with the fantastic Van Gogh collection would be closed by then, but it was our last night and we wanted to take the tour on the famous free white bicycles. We found them neatly lined up in their lot and found ones that fit us. The park has wonderful bicycle paths which run all through its savannahs - and that is the right word for them. We had been looking at highly traditional European palace and formal gardens at Het Loo, and suddenly here was an open landscape with long parched brown grass and scattered, very African looking trees. And of course, herds of moufflon, and deer. The air was warm and dry, the breeze comfortable, the sun in no hurry to set, the park completely deserted by humans. We sped along those seemingly endless paths with the feeling of being twice removed from home, as far from the Netherlands as from the US, in some place that was so perfect it didn't matter where it was, if it was a real place. And the strange long day, as if the day at the park was tacked onto the day at the palace without any night between. We did the full loop, up to the lake and the lodge then back another way. When it was just beginning to get dark we left the bikes and walked back to the inn, completely wiped out and ready to pass out.
I want to go back!
David In Indy:
--- Quote from: Andrew on July 18, 2006, 09:41:39 pm ---I don't suppose you got to the Hoge Veluwe National Park when you were in Arnhem, David? That is one of my finest memories of the Netherlands.
--- End quote ---
Andrew, No I/we didn't go to this park when I was in the Netherlands. The name does ring a bell though. Grandpa took us to the Netherlands to teach and show us our family history and Dutch history. We didn't really spend any time going to the parks, although I would have loved it. Grandpa took us to 5 cities, and a few smaller towns in Zeeland, and we did it all in roughly 14 days. My little 14 year old mind was reeling from everything we saw by the time I arrived back home in Indianapolis. I remember the entire trip though. I would love to go back to the Netherlands someday and see the country again, but I would take it a little slower the next time. :D
Edit: Andrew, I really feel as if I don't need to go and see Hoge Veluwe now. As I was reading your post, I could see it all in my mind. Have you ever thought about becoming an author? You write beautifully! You have a way of painting pictures with your words. I wish I could do that! :D
mvansand76:
--- Quote from: Andrew on July 18, 2006, 09:41:39 pm ---
I want to go back!
--- End quote ---
Hi Andrew - I love the way you describe de Hoge Veluwe, it's quite unique, isn't it? As David said, you have a way of painting pictures with your words, that's quite unique as well! Het Loo is beautiful, the gardens surrounding it are amazing. De Hoge Veluwe is one of my two favorite places in Holland, the other is the dune area at the coast around Bergen, Schoorl and Camperduin/Hargen, it's beautiful there, I love the beach, which is as quiet as they come in Holland, the woods, the place exudes peacefulness, I call it my Brokeback Mountain! Maybe a tip for your next trip to Holland? ;D
Andrew:
David, you are obviously in need of a return visit to the Netherlands! Your grandfather achieved his great hope: your ancestral home has become an part of who you are.
Part of the underlayer of my trip was that it was my first back to Europe since I was 20, so I was relating everything in 1999 back to what I experienced im my impressionable early adulthood. My family travelled to Europe once every three years while I was in my teens and I greedily took in whatever was unlike what I knew from Indianapolis, which was obviously, almost everything. We tended to stay the most in Germany and Austria since my mother was of German descent and she and my father had studied a year in Marburg after their wedding. For her, too, visiting these places was a connection to the past and a reminder that she was not a different person deep down than the young student of so many years back. I was the youngest in my family and our births were widely spaced, so her year of study was twenty-eight years earlier than her first visit with her children. Seeing Marburg again, knowing she had not just dreamed her past, I imagine was something indescribable for her.
Andrew:
There is a way for me to get seamlessly back on topic, crossing from Marburg into the Netherlands via France, and it will be the more seamless now that I no longer need to show a passport or change currency as I had to do when I was last in Europe.
Not everyone knows that the mysterious beautiful land described in Baudelaire's poem L'Invitation au Voyage was the Netherlands, or at least his idea of it inspired by Vermeer.
"...Songe a la douceur
D'aller la-bas vivre ensemble!
...
La, tout n'est qu'ordre et beaute,
Luxe, calme et volupte."
"...Think of the rapture of going there to live together!...
There, all is order and beauty, luxury, calm and pleasure to the senses."
Baudelaire was only the nex-to-last of the Romantics. As you may have gathered by now, I'm the last...or at least I'm in that club.
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