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May 27 Saturday sunny, puffy clouds, humid 23º C Bicycle touring Holland Woke up at 2:30 AM. I have now confirmed it: The church bells do go at night. I was awake until it got light -- about 5:30 AM. Fell back asleep in one of those weird semi-awake-sleep dreaming states. It was 9:30 AM before we finally packed up our cycle touring tent and all our bicycle touring gear. Phoned Bob and Amy to see if our Mastercard arrived in their postbox. Yes. Yesterday. Guess we'll have to cycle over to their place some day and pick up our new Mastercard. It'll be nice to have money again. We want to see the Kroller-Muller Art Museum. It's located in the National Park, so we arrange to meet at Bob and Amy's house late this afternoon or tomorrow morning. We pull our fully loaded touring bicycles to a stop before the park and eat sweet bread and puddings. The Dutch actually put lumps of sugar in the sweet bread. When I went into the bakery to buy it, the young woman clerk asked me if I had cycled all the way from England just to buy it. It cost $7.50 each to go into the National Park. Fortunately, that also included admission to the museum. Lots of Van Gogh's. A Picasso. Weird modern art. Is that stuff done by people who have mental problems? It is wacko. I could do better. My favourite was "Wife." A few dashes. At least they could have put in a couple of dots. Must have caught her on a good day. Green hair. I saw a lot of people yawning. There were some nice frames. On the other side, I liked the painting of Venus and Cupid Stealing Honey: bees were buzzing around Cupid. And I liked Still Life in a Cupboard: A mouse eating bread. Great detail. Van Gogh's: The Potato Eaters (Saw another artist had painted The Potato Eaters with harsher features. It was in the basement of the Rijksmuseum.) Charlie Toroop: Clown in Front of Rotterdam Ruins: the clown was very colourful while Rotterdam was black and white. Ladies Meeting in an Orchard: all done in dots of color. And a Monet painting of a houseboat -- not what I expected from Monet. Headed for Hilversum on our fully loaded touring bicycles where Bob and Amy live. At 7:30 PM we were eight kilometres from Hilversum and we hadn't eaten yet. We pulled our touring bicycles into a forest and set up camp. Lots of mosquitoes. (Sharon had asked the cops riding over the dike why there are so many bugs in Holland. Because this is Holland was their reply. "Section C subsection 1A," one of them added. Saw lots of white bikes in the park. Apparently, it's one of the last remaining places that have white bicycles left in Holland. The white bike idea was to have a bunch of bikes available for people to ride from one place and then leave the bike at their destination. Someone else could come along and take that bike that you just left and they would ride it to wherever they want to go. Apparently, the white bicycle idea, good in concept, was an immense failure in practical terms. Supposedly, everyone wanted to ride the white bicycles to his house and then the white bicycles were painted red, blue, green, black -- anything but white. When I first saw the bike map with a bike path marked "white bicycles" in the park, I thought it must be for blind cyclists. "Why these Dutch think of everything," I said. |
