Maybe I'd be outside as you passed on your bike…” # – Ben Folds
Everybody needs a rest and holiday, right? The way I tend to approach my writing is the same as I would any job – I do the actual act of scribbling and typing up my thoughts during the working week and then at weekends, where ironically most of my free time lies, I enjoy the break from it, concentrating on family life at home…
Well, recently, my wife and I planned what turned out to be a brilliant cycling trip to the Netherlands to help us unwind in this early part of the year from the pressures of our day jobs. Once again, even though I took a couple of small notebooks with me, after my strivings with the new draft of Moon Crater, I was actually looking forward to giving my brain a rest and time to recuperate from the story for a week or so…
We were following a small part of the the North Sea Cycle Route but were still making a bit of an epic journey being non-professional cyclists 30 miles south to a place called Rijnsburg. We’d take in some great views along the way though, passing through Zandvoort, Noordwijk, and Katwijk in “Zuid Holland”, journeying through quite rough terrain at times along the coast regions (although, as we discovered and quietly hoped when sitting at home planning the trip, the Netherlands is absolutely geared towards cyclists, so their “rough” roads were still enjoyable to travel on, and all the cycle roads (not paths!) gave the humble cyclist a lot of room to maneouvre confidently away from cars and other infernal petrol machines… (Vespas seem particularly popular around Rijinsburg IN the cycle lanes too!) I have to say too that I was really surprised how easy it is riding with fully-loaded panniers across the back of a bike - I thought it'd feel really heavy, but was pleasantly relieved to find the balance of the bike actually helped immensely.
We were using Rijnsburg as a base for the week and it was on a Eurocamp site there that we’d rented a luxury tent… and apart
One such place was the European Space Research and Technology Centre which allows visitors to look round a brillian
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A couple of the other places we visited on the west coast of Holland were Leiden (where we saw our first up-close working windmill, both inside and out!), Voorhout, Haarlam, Delph (where we went potty over the pottery) and Den Haag. This last place is definitely going to be worth a longer trip back to it – “The Hague” with its brilliant open markets and inspiring the M.C.Escher Museum) isn’t to be missed if you’re in this region of the Netherlands.
I began this post by saying that I was looking forward to having a “holiday” from my writing on this trip as well as life back home, but I also mentioned that I always like to take a notebook along with me or even buy a new blank one as a memento of the trip (pocket-sized, cheap and with completely blank pages is normally the
Visiting the ESA Centre too though proved actually particularly
Anyway, If you still haven’t discovered my “Moon Crater Adventur
Coming back down to Earth, and more specifically, to adventures of a different kind in the Netherlands, I’d have to say that our Holland holiday was a fantastic break and worked out much better than we’d hoped, never having done a trip away completely on bikes. Over there, push-bikes are without doubt prized positions, (and apparently can even be a status symbol if they’re from the World War Two era, being snatched from the occupying Germans who left them behind when they had to leave unexpected in 1945…) Overall it was just what a holiday should be – relaxing and full of fresh air. I loved the fact that people in Holland just seemed to cycle up to bike racks with dozens of cycles (if not hundreds in some places) and just left their bike propped up against another (we did still lock ours just as a precaution), but you got the real sense that there’s a geniune respect for this particular item of personal property in Holland…
Since I’ve mixed sci-fi obscurely with a trip to mainland Europe in this post (I'm sure Escher himself would have found the mix of real and imaginary fitting though), I’ll end with one last anecdote from our Netherlands trip which was just gobsmacking to me when I saw it. Sending some postcards in a newsagents in Voorhout I looked at a stand of greetings cards and noticed some for Father’s Day and suddenly a 30-year-old mystery was solved… The Dutch word for father is “Vader” – now, I’m a huge Star Wars geek, and it dawned on me that George Lucas back in ’77 was dropping a big fat hint at who the Dark Lord of the Sith really was in his original space odyssey, even before the terrible truth was revealed with the sequel in 1983! It just goes to show you, a good character name can be the key starting point for any great story…
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