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In the lowlands low
Apr. 24th, 2017 06:07 pmWe are on board, and sailing homeward from Amsterdam, due to arrive on Tyneside after breakfast tomorrow. Whether this will be posted before then, who knows? We have wifi, sort of, but there isn't much of it: so far I have connected to Dreamwidth and - eventually - to LiveJournal: webmail seems to be out of the question. So I'm writing this offline, and we shall see what we shall see.
From Aachen it's just a hop across the border to the Netherlands - to Maastricht, specifically. And then it's north all the way, and the whole drive is on motorways. We took a break when we were nearly there, and spent 24 hours in Utrecht (about which more with pictures at some future date). But the drive north was lovely, despite being motorway, all spring greens and yellows: great billows of yellow flowers all along the verges, which I'm pretty sure are rape (that acid yellow is some kind of brassica, surely) and the bright green of water meadows, and the delicate green of trees just coming into spring foliage, and the rows of pollarded willows by the water. Not to mention the asparagus stands by the side roads, because here, too, it is asparagus season, though this is Dutch asparagus, and the stands fly the national flag. And because we are in the Netherlands, we also saw at least two teams of cyclists in matching strip, and one iconic windmill.
This afternoon's motorway from Utrecht to Amsterdam was more urban, but that had its interest, too: some magnificently over-the-top modern office buildings, the most spectacular of all, a curved wall of glass and stone decorated with purple banners celebrating KPMG's hundredth birthday. But there was water, which improves any landscape - though when our satnav tried to persuade us to take a ferry across one of those bodies of water, we put our feet down, and drove the long way round (which was, in fact, the signposted route).
Of course we were still early for the ferry, and kept waiting until almost the last to load - and then directed to a point on the car deck which is as far as possible removed from our cabin (seriously: the length of a corridor, up two flights of stairs, down two flights of stairs and back the length of the corridor). But the cabin is comfortable enough, and we'll see if we can improve that journey in the morning, and meanwhile I am in the bar with a glass of Sancerre (keeping up that asparagus theme), ready to put that wifi to the test and go in search of dinner.
From Aachen it's just a hop across the border to the Netherlands - to Maastricht, specifically. And then it's north all the way, and the whole drive is on motorways. We took a break when we were nearly there, and spent 24 hours in Utrecht (about which more with pictures at some future date). But the drive north was lovely, despite being motorway, all spring greens and yellows: great billows of yellow flowers all along the verges, which I'm pretty sure are rape (that acid yellow is some kind of brassica, surely) and the bright green of water meadows, and the delicate green of trees just coming into spring foliage, and the rows of pollarded willows by the water. Not to mention the asparagus stands by the side roads, because here, too, it is asparagus season, though this is Dutch asparagus, and the stands fly the national flag. And because we are in the Netherlands, we also saw at least two teams of cyclists in matching strip, and one iconic windmill.
This afternoon's motorway from Utrecht to Amsterdam was more urban, but that had its interest, too: some magnificently over-the-top modern office buildings, the most spectacular of all, a curved wall of glass and stone decorated with purple banners celebrating KPMG's hundredth birthday. But there was water, which improves any landscape - though when our satnav tried to persuade us to take a ferry across one of those bodies of water, we put our feet down, and drove the long way round (which was, in fact, the signposted route).
Of course we were still early for the ferry, and kept waiting until almost the last to load - and then directed to a point on the car deck which is as far as possible removed from our cabin (seriously: the length of a corridor, up two flights of stairs, down two flights of stairs and back the length of the corridor). But the cabin is comfortable enough, and we'll see if we can improve that journey in the morning, and meanwhile I am in the bar with a glass of Sancerre (keeping up that asparagus theme), ready to put that wifi to the test and go in search of dinner.
