Week 5 - Utrecht and Middelburg

by Timothy Perrin

Utrecht - August 31-September 2

In Utrecht, we stayed with a lovely woman named Marion Beltran. She is Terre's age and works as the department head at a local college in a program to train arts managers. These are people who aren't artists themselves but who manage galleries, theatre companies or the like.

She took us on a long bike ride for some great apple pie by the river. On the way there we went by a house where Napoleon's brother used to live. On the way back, we went by the Schröder-Schräder House designed by Gerrit Rietveld, an architect friend of abstract artist Piet Mondriaan that looks like a Mondriaan painting, all primary colors and straight lines. It was completely out of place on a street of conventional brick Dutch homes.

Rietveld started out as a carpenter, only later becoming an architect. Along with Piet Mondriaan, Bart van der Leck, Theo van Doesburg and others, they founded the De Stijl movement, an abstract integrated style.
The style quickly spread beyond Holland and was picked up by people like El Lissitzky in Russia and Vilmos Huszar in Hungary. There were connections with the German Bauhaus style. De Stijl was more than architecture. It was a style, a way of approaching design, and was used for paintings, furniture, carpets, even book design. (Thanks to Ineke for the background on Rietveld, Mondriaan, De Stijl, and for the links.)

Terre also came up with a great title for a piece on Holland: "Bricks and Bikes." Now all I need is the story.

More Camping - September 3-9

After leaving, Marion's on the 2nd, we did our first big stretch of camping down on the coast in Zeeland, the southwestern province of Holland.

What we did do while down there was do some test riding of another tandem recumbent bicycle, an M5 tandem. Now this is a beautiful bike. We have also tried out an Altena tandem but, on the whole, we prefer the M5. We took it for a 20 km ride to a nearby town. Now, we are trying to figure out how to afford it (€3500 - CDN $5600 - US $4200). Right now it is out of the question. (The Altena is even more expensive, €4200!)

We are camped tonight (Sep 8) on the Lek River about 30 km up river from Rotterdam, the largest seaport in the world. There is a steady traffic of barges and river boats. The picture of Yoda in week 4 is actually the campsite on the Lek.

Tomorrow we go to Almere on the New Polder. (A polder is land reclaimed from the sea). It is the youngest city in Holland, only 25 years old. We spend the weekend with Ineke and Benno again eating up their leftovers from the party and going to a fruit and vegetable parade. (Don't ask; I don't know. Talk to Terre on this one.)

Then we will spend a few days in Rotterdam, Pick up Jonnie for a day or two in Amsterdam and Haarlem doing museums, then, only three weeks behind schedule, on to Belgium.

At this rate, we'll be home in time for the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. But as we like to say, we don't really have a schedule. We are in no rush to get no where. With rare exceptions, we don't have commitments other than to ourselves.

Talk to you later.

Tim