Tuesday 12 June 2018
Distance 56.22km
Time 3:44:06
Average speed 15.1km/hElevation 51mTemperature 16C
The plan was to be up and on the road early again, however that was thwarted by me parking my bike in a secure “feistenstalling” for the evening which did not open until 8am ... a completely wonderful cunning plan I thought. So, we had a wonderful breakfast in a fabulous cafe with a very personable host in Eindhoven. If you go to Eindhoven you must visit the Meneer de Boer cafe. Tasty food served in very creative ways.
Our departure from Eindhoven has us head toward the We spent a few hours here learning about the role of the Allies in Operation Market Garden.
We rode through the fields which were part of the Market Garden Offensive by the allies in Ww2 (a bridge too far) and visited the ‘Wings of Liberation Museum ’ which was much bigger than we expected. There were monuments all over the place to different platoons and men in places you would not see without being on a bike.
We headed off but not before being made aware that we were passing through and past the fields where the allies had been dropped for "Operation Market Garden". The film a bridge too far is a depiction of this event.
We continued on to find a couple of castles, which had been a bit on the scarce side on this trip. We found a small castle (or really a manor house) in the middle of what is now suburbia, it was lovely. Kasteel Heckenshage was built in the 14th century.
We then moved onto Kasteel Heeswijk which was really big and very imporessive and now a museum where the last person who owned the castle bequeathed the lot to the state to be a museum. This seemed to be a trend in wealthy Dutch families. We had some lunch in a small park nearby, then went into the castle to have a look around. We spent quite a bit of time exploring the many rooms and the stories of the 40 different owners since the 1100’s.There were so many things inside to look at.
After leaving this castle we headed off to the train station at 's-Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch), arriving at 4:30 and being told we couldn’t take our bikes onto the train between 4:00 & 6:30. So we cycled off to get some dinner and wait out the time. The Burger Bar we found had our food out in record time - under 15 minutes, which for Dutch restaurants is lightening fast. We did have to ask specifically for this as many times our dinner has taken nearly 3 hours!!
The train journey was about 40 minutes and we managed to chat to a Dutch couple who were returning from the Canary Islands. They had quite a journey still to get home after flying into Eindhoven and they lived in the north of the Netherlands.
We arrived in Utrecht with the thousands of other commuters and attempted to get out of the station. I lost Wayne in the crown and we were separated for a little while, but were reunited to then find our hotel which was a bit out of town.
We had already had our dinner, so it was washing the clothes time and into bed. Long day.
The photo of the piano player below - every station in the Netherlands has a grand piano which people can play for no charge, this man was playing while the commuters walked past.
No comments:
Post a Comment