Week 1 (revised Sep 14) - Arrival, a tiny bit of Amsterdam, Eemnes, Spakenburg, Laren, The Hidden Garden

by

Timothy Perrin

Typically for me, I keep wanting to make everything perfect and only post my best stuff. As a result, I've been delaying putting up anything. That is ending here.

This is a summary of what we've been doing since we arrived, based on e-mails to various people, edited and spliced together here with lots of additions.

Arrival

I arrived on August 3, 2005, on Air Canada. Terre wasn't set to arrive until the next day since we were traveling on different point systems.

We are staying most of the time with hosts who are members of SERVAS, an international peace organization based on the premise that the world would be a better place if we all sat down to dinner and got to know one another (http://www.servas.org/). So, people who are willing to host travelers for a night or two list themselves in a directory which is available to screened travelers. Then you call or write or e-mail and ask if you can stay. More often than not, the answer is "Sure."

The first thing I did on arriving was check in with Donna Turner, the woman in Utrecht from whom we were buying the van (http://www.dutchcampervans.com/). Donna met a nice Dutch boy in Cleveland in 1971 and, well, you know the story.

I took my vastly excessive load of luggage to Utrecht on the train, dragged it the length of the train station and Donna picked me up. I left virtually all of my stuff in the van and then took the train into Amsterdam for the night burdened with just an overnight bag and my computer bag -- what I should have brought in the first place. I e-mailed Terre to leave everything behind and travel light. (She still brought 90 lbs of stuff, but that was better than the 200 she had planned to bring.)

Amsterdam - August 3-4

Our host in Amsterdam those first two nights (one night for Terre) was Sharon Belden, an exceedingly nice lady, formerly from Oregon but now some 30 years now in Holland and a Dutch citizen. She teaches English for a living in a country where virtually everyone knows at least a little English and most want to get better at it. (Next to bicycles, English seems the second most popular pastime in this country.) She lives on a small "plein" or square (actually a triangle in her case) with the old trolley repair barns on one side. Now some developer wants to turn them into an entertainment center which, not surprisingly, has the neighborhood in a tizzy as they don't want their parking mess to be even worse, plus the crowds and the noise.

I went to Schiphol Airport on Thursday, August 4, to pick up Terre. When we finally spotted each other, we hugged and hung on like it had been one year instead of one day since we'd seen each other. Our reaction surprised both of us, but it was very strong. I was very glad to see her, and she me.

Eemnes - August 5-10

We stayed six days, August 5-10, in the village of Eemnes with Jonnie Reinders, a great lady who would probably have liked us to stay permanently. She was very good to us but she can't give directions for shit. She would always leave out something like, oh say, a city or a river or a country, something minor like that. You had to take her directions as merely being like "over that way." It was always, "Oh it's easy. You can't miss it." But we always did because she always gave lousy directions. (Sorry, Jonnie.) Maybe it was because she didn't want us to leave. She would never say "north" or "east." "The Dutch don't know the directions," she tried to convince us.

We got real tired of being lost--and not just from Jonnie's directions. After we left Amsterdam and took the train down to Utrecht and actually picked up the van, we got hopelessly lost getting out of Utrecht. We ended up going 20 km on the wrong freeway, had to double back, fight our way through the Utrecht rush hour traffic to the right freeway, etc. And this was after I had gone to MapQuest.com, downloaded the directions and printed them out, turn by turn. We were so frustrated that we bought a Tom-Tom, a satellite navigation system. It was actually Terre's idea since she is not a good map reader or navigator and hates the job. (I point this out since I am usually the techno junkie.) Now, the system does the navigation for us, telling us exactly where and when to turn, and takes us right to the door of places we've never been in complicated medieval cities with short little streets that twist and change names every 50 feet. It's really quite amazing. We love it. So far, it's only given us one or two bad steers, and then it was able to quickly compensate. If you miss a turn or for some reason take another route, it just adapts, calculates a new route on the fly and keeps going. Now, this is useful technology.

Spakenburg

Near Eemnes, we visited the town of Spakenburg during their annual festival. This is a fishing town on what used to be the Zuiderzee but what is now a freshwater lake. The folks there dress up in traditional costume, the main street gets closed down by street vendors, and there are many too many people around. But the harbor is beautiful. And we found a good electronic scale for €1.00. It was part of our acclimatization to getting around and learning simple things like driving and parking and communicating in Holland.

Laren

Laren is on the other side of the freeway from Eemnes and is an older town. Eemnes is a modern suburb created in a traditional style. Laren, on the other hand, has been around a while. Not three or four hundred years like many of the towns in this part of the world, but a while.

Every summer, in a grove of huge trees on the town green outside the church, a waffle house sets up shop in a temporary building that goes right around the trees. They use traditional methods of making waffles on an old fashioned machine that is the size of a couple of upright pianos back-to-back but all shiny and metallic. The cooks work busily pumping out the waffles as fast as they can because the place is very popular.

The Hidden Garden

Jonnie also took us to what we came to call “The Hidden Garden.” This is a lovely tea house by a stream that came about by accident. Apparently, the owner inherited the property from his father. While the father had lived there, the rules had changed and the son could not. So, what to do with this beautiful property? While he couldn’t live on it, he could run a business on it, so that is what he did.

His wife cooks the pastries. He builds—gazebos, fanciful dollhouses, whatever his wife tells him it needs—and he does the landscaping, which is breathtaking. The result is a breathtaking oasis with incredible food.

What more could you ask for?

tp