Beek

🎶 Lang zal ze leven in de gloriiiia 🎶 we sang at breakfast for Paul’s birthday while he opened his gifts. Another year older perhaps but Paul’s energy is as though he is aging backwards! Paul’s choice of activity for the day was a 16km walk on about the only hilly landscape that Holland has. Though not too many steep inclines, the walking tracks were super enjoyable and ended up being a good practice walk for Paul & Myra before their next big trip to walk more phases of the German ‘Eifel’ hiking trail which would happen in the following week.
We drove to Berg en Dal in Nijmegen to start the walk with little doggy Cooper in the back - a dog that Myra and Paul look after for a local lady every so often (one of their 4 or 5 “loan dogs”), very cute! Here the sun must have known it was Paul’s birthday as it was sunny, hot, beautiful weather. Luckily most of the walk was through the forest and we had lots of cool tree cover, but my favourite parts were the breaks in the forest through the tracks by rolling meadows and farm land. I also loved the little gnomes and garden ornaments around the houses/cottages. We stopped for some pre-prepared fruit and sandwiches at lunch and at the end of the track we celebrated with cake! Appeltart again - this time a sort of colder tart, which was so delicious and surprisingly refreshing after the walk. Made even more refreshing with a Leffe Blond 0.0%… a beer I’ve enjoyed a lot while in The Netherlands. While on the walk I had mentioned I was interested in seeing Arnhem because of it’s WWII history if it ended up being on our next travels, but it turned out to be much closer to Nijmegen than I thought it was (a common realisation we had as we travelled around Holland was how much closer everything is), and so on the way home Myra and Paul took us on a short detour home via the John Frost Bridge aka ‘A Bridge Too Far’ to see the rebuilt area and nearby monuments along the Nederrijn (the Rhine). A really interesting historical spot and I hadn’t realised the rebuilt bridge looked so similar to the old bridge before it was bombed. Now out near Arnhem and in need of fueling up the car, Paul said that the fuel was cheaper in Germany so for about 5mins we were over the German border to hit one of the petrol stations there on the way home…a very strange experience for the kiwis. So technically we’d been to 4 countries at this point.

After this great, but long day out in the heat, we got a big smorgasbord of deep-fried foods for dinner from a classic Dutch ‘snackbar’, including croquettes, frikandel speciaal, sitostick, kaassoufflé and more. We were so so full at the end of dinner. The kind of full that puts you straight to bed, so that’s what happened.Read more