Kinderdijk, Rotterdam

Wow the motorways are big, so many lanes, so often you seem to be leaving the motorway and rejoining it. So often we were in the wrong lane, but we got to our chosen site without too much issue. This is a big parking lot for motorhomes €18.50 . It does have showers and toilets although we haven’t used them. Electric is metered and costs extra (as do the showers). It’s next to sports facilities, how come everywhere on the continent has great sports facilities and the UK doesn’t?

I always like the feel in The Netherlands, it always seems like a friendly place. And of course bikes are king here. It’s strange to a UK person how bikes get right of way on bike paths , it’s something you have to be careful of as a driver and as a cyclist I automatically stop for the cars and confuse all the drivers. But the bike paths are lovely. I do wonder what all the cycling does for the nation’s health bill and carbon footprint. It must be good for both.

We spent a day in Rotterdam, taking the water-bus to get there. Rotterdam was flattened during the war and hence is all modern buildings. Some of the rows of shop are just 60’s buildings, utilitarian and ugly. Some of the more modern glass buildings look weird. The food market is a place to visit if you are in Rotterdam, but go before you eat. It is huge and full of eateries of all kinds. We’d eaten so we just had a coffee, at an eye watering price. It would have been nice to go back for evening meal, but budget is an issue so that was not to be. The second day we went to Kinderdijk windmills which is a UNESCO heritage museum. Again rather expensive for what you got, but interesting enough. The windmills of course were to pump the water away from the land, a hard life for the millers.

The road surfaces in The Netherlands are a dream, like our roads were about 10 years ago, we didn’t have the tom tom bounce out of its cradle on a regular basis. The other thing to note is that we can only do 80KPH (50 mph) on the motorways. It makes it a very leisurely drive ( and makes the German ones seem really fast once you’ve crossed the border).