21.08.2007

We decided that we would spend our 2 whole days in Nederland with one day in Amsterdam and the other exploring a nearby national park that Eveline knew followed by a tour of Zwolle. The weather report showed a 70% chance of rain today and 80% the next day so we decided that we will visit the park on the day with the marginally lower chance of rain. That was this day. We drove for about 45 minutes to find the De Hoge Veluwe National Park. The park is a mixture of forests and plains covered in tall grasses and purple flowers. It was a really welcome change to spend some time in nature again. With the exception of some of Croatia, the last few weeks feel like they have been city after city. A different thing about this park (for us, not for the Dutch) is that almost no-one walks, everyone is riding bicycles. They supply these free white bikes for people to borrow. We spent a couple of hours riding around and taking pictures. We had lunch in the park restaurant. We then road off to look at an old hunting lodge in the middle of the park. It started to rain a bit as we started our 15km ride back to the car. It still seemed nice to be riding in light rain while the trees provided some shelter, but that didn’t last long as then it started bucketing down. I went through stages of thinking ‘okay, my jeans are completely drenched and my shirt is sticking to me, but at least my socks are dry. Ten minutes later it was ‘okay, I need to let the pools of water out of my shoes but at least the underwear is dry. Then it was ‘oh well, we can’t get any wetter’. I could hear Eveline starting to sneeze behind me. At least the weather was still warm.

At the time we dropped off the bikes and walked into the car park the rain actually stopped. We all saw the humour in it, but the ride home was a wet one. In Zwolle it was hot showers, warm clothes and hot tea and lots of chocolate to try to avoid getting sick. Once fully recovered we went into Zwolle for a tour. Eveline tried her best to answer all of the tourist questions that we were firing at her. The old town is surrounded by a canal or moat. We took in tours of the shopping strip, two of Eveline’s family's restaurants Poppe and Pampus, and tried a few pubs. One of the pubs was hosting its weekly ‘Murphy’s’ quiz night (though the pub doesn’t actually stock any Murphys). We were able to help out Eveline’s friend in the music round, taking them to a position of second to last.