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!
