THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 3, 1994 TAG: 9406300095
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, TRAVEL EDITOR
LENGTH: Long : 328 lines
THE SPEEDOMOTER NEEDLE dances between 100 and 120. That's kilometers per hour, I think. I have a brain cloud that precludes my understanding the metric system, so I don't really know how fast that is. It's what everyone else seems to be doing on this Dutch equivalent of a U.S. Interstate highway.
Whatever it is, it's faster than I'd like to be driving because I don't quite know where I'm headed. And that makes me nervous.
At the moment I'm just trying to get out of metropolitan Amsterdam and into the Dutch countryside. I've done Amsterdam to death, and now I want to see the other Holland. Windmills and quaint villages. Maybe even find things a bit less pricey.
The Netherlands Board of Tourism suggested a ``Deals on Wheels'' program they use to introduce travel writers to their country - a self-drive itinerary tailored to one's interests that focuses on good value for the dollar in a variety of lodgings and eateries throughout the country.
Loraine Netto of the NBT's New York office had plotted a course for me. The purple roads are the pretty ones, she explained as we pored over the map. And the little yellow ones are the real country roads. Travel those when you can, she urged.
We had talked about wandering and getting lost and how much fun that can actually be. Right now, though, I'm not so sure. But I'm committed to four days in the countryside, and I'm on my way.
Day 1: I'm headed for The Hague, the center of the Dutch government. The signs point toward Den Haag. That's got to be it.
A train streaks past, a ribbon of yellow and blue. That's always been my vantage point before. Now I'm on my own . . . and for this first hour I'm much more nervous than I'd hoped. What if I want to get off this expresssway? Can I find my way? Can I get back on?
No problem. Less than an hour out of Amsterdam I find the Den Haag afrit (exit), and signs immediately point to Centrum. That's the city center. That's where I want to go. Next I look for big blue signs with a P for parking. I find a street-side parking area just a block from the city center. Now, how to pay. A young man shows me how to work the automatic ticket machine.
``You figure how long you want to stay, then insert a guilder for each 30 minutes,'' he explains in English. ``It's fairly expensive. Then you take the ticket showing how long you've paid for inside your windscreen.''
I wander around for more than an hour. It's a beautiful city, but it still has a ``city'' feel to it. I want something smaller. A town, a village, the countryside.
Delft is more like what I had in mind . . . except for the traffic. Thursday is market day. The rectangular town square between the imposing Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) and the decorative Town Hall is PACKED with tent-like stalls where everything imaginable is being sold. Just around the corner, beside a smelly fish market, the fragrant flower market stretches along a canal for several blocks.
Dutch men will take home flowers even when they don't have a guilty conscience.
Bicycles and pedestrians make moving about very difficult. Better to watch it all from a sidewalk cafe. Or wander the picturesque side streets.
This is the birthplace of the 17th century painter Jan Vermeer. He is buried in the Oude Kerk, built about 1200. In the Nieuwe Kerk is the tomb of the first William of Orange, so-called Father of the Fatherland, and 40 other members of the royal House of Orange.
Delft first gained prominence in the 1500s from its beer, made from the water of the town's canals. In the 16th century, when the water went bad, the breweries had to shut down. The brewers' vast warehouses were soon transformed into ceramics centers, first copying the china brought back by the Dutch East India traders.
These people got so good at it that their product, Delftware, became world-famous in its own right. Once there were more than 30 potteries producing their individual brands of the mostly blue and white china. Now there are only three manufacturers left. All three are open Monday through Saturday for tours.
On the road again. The traffic is awful - trucks, road machinery, train crossings - and it is raining off and on. In Gouda, the cheese place, I get lost.
I had figured that if I can drive in Britain, doing everything backward - right-hand drive, left side of the road - I ought to be able to deal with driving in Holland or anywhere on the Continent. It's just like the United States. It hadn't occurred to me that the signs would be in Dutch. Like detour signs around road construction. Now I know.
Eventually, I find my way, and I also find that traffic is no longer a problem.
I round a corner south of Schoonhaven and come upon the River Lek . . . and no bridge. This is a secondary road. There's a ferry across the 300 yards of water here. Three very long and low canal barges glide across our bow as we cross. Headed for Germany or Rotterdam, I imagine.
The fields on either side of the road are as flat as a billiard table, but in lighter shades of green. Some have herds of black and white Friesen cattle, the national animal; others have herds of brown and white cattle, the alternate national animal; still others sheep and goats. Village church steeples stand out on the horizon. So do windmills.
Dordrecht is my first day's destination. It's located at the intersection of three major rivers. In 1220 it became the first town in Holland to be enfranchised, and it remained the country's most powerful town until Amsterdam took over in the 16th century.
My hotel, the Bellevue, is at the confluence of these waters. It's adjacent to the Groothoofd (literally ``Big Head''), the ornate domed entry-gate building to the town built in 1418. A little drawbridge across a narrow channel leading to an inner harbor for pleasure boats is outside my windows.
This is the town where in 1572 the First Assembly of the Free States was held, which led to the independence of the Netherlands. Sort of the Dutch Philadelphia. Wonderful town for strolling. With a little imagination you can picture life here in the 16th or 17th century.
Rates at the cozy Bellevue are $59 single, $78 double, with buffet breakfast. I had dinner in the Groothoofd, converted recently to a restaurant. Great atmosphere and service, good and abundant food. They offer a four-course dinner with numerous choices for $23. After-dinner cigars from the prestigious P.G.C. Hajenius tobacco shop of Amsterdam are extra.
Day 2 dawns dark and threatening. No matter. I have learned that in Holland this probably will change. Every hour or so.
As I have breakfast overlooking the water and the brooding sky, six gray minelayers (I think) flying the German ensign cruise toward me in echelon, then turn up another river. Fifty years ago this would have been an ominous sight. Now . . . maybe they're headed home from a North Sea NATO exercise.
The river traffic is heavy . . . small barges with turned-up bows that resemble wooden shoes, big, black-hulled coal barges with what appears to be just a foot or so of freeboard, extra-long barges with stacked containers. Large ocean-going vessels like those we see in Hampton Roads are rare along these rivers. Barges transfer the cargo of those ships inland.
Today is the day for windmills. Just up the road at Kinderdijk I find 19 of them along two canals. Each is about four stories tall. Most of them are made of brick, hulking sentinels of another age. All were built around 1740. Until they were superseded by electric-powered screw pumps in this century, they drained water from the Alablasserwaard polders, situated below sea level, and into the River Lek.
They are amazing to see. To take in the scene properly, you have to walk several miles on a paved footpath between the canals.
Only one is in operation today, but every Saturday afternoon in July and August all 76 mill sails, each with a span of more than 60 feet, are rigged and brought to the wind. During the second full week in September, the mills are illuminated at night. That must be a sight. In the winter the Dutch ice skate on these canals - just like in the Old Masters' paintings.
I am driving along the dyke that contains the River Lek. On my left barges ply the brown water. Sheep graze in the thick riverside grass. The land on my right, lush green and bisected with small drainage canals, is about 30 feet below the surface of the river. The roofs of the mostly two-story brick houses down there are at my eye level.
It suddenly occurs to me that I have gotten the hang of this driving. It has become a breeze.
I am heading for Heusden, an ancient fortified town, and when it comes into view across the flat landscape it appears to be something out of the sketchbook of a 16th century military engineer. Which it is.
It is laid out in the shape of a D, with the flat side on the south bank of the River Maas. To the land side, spaced at even intervals, are eight large arrowhead-shaped high earth bastions surrounded by a water moat. In the moat are four triangular island bastions, and outside that another ring of bastions and still another moat.
Tough place to enter if you weren't a friend. But not impossible, not after indirect mortar fire made such fortifications obsolete. The French took the town in 1795, the Prussians in 1813. The retreating Nazi army made a mess of the place in 1944, leaving 134 dead civilians under the debris. Extensive restoration began in 1968.
A causeway across the moats makes entering easier today, for both visitors and the 5,500 inhabitants.
Inside are three imposing churches, a couple of windmills, hundreds of tile-roofed brick houses and shops and tree-shaded, winding cobblestone streets and alleys. The streets have names like Hoogstraat, Botermarkt, Waterpoort, Wittebroodstraat, Scheepswerf, Synagogestraat and Lombardstraat. You don't have to know Dutch to figure out what sort of activities took place on these streets.
Well, maybe on Lombardstraat. The Lombards were from northern Italy. They introduced to the world the concept of double-entry ledgers and credit. They were the world's first organized bankers, and they established themselves in every commercial center in Europe.
There's evidence of Roman settlement at Heusden about 50 B.C. It was an organized town by the late 13th century. The fortifications were begun in 1581. Today it has the appearance of a 16th century Williamsburg.
I had contemplated a lunch at one of the sidewalk cafes in the market square, but a motorcoach load of German women, fairly drunk, singing loudly and dancing in a conga line, distracted from the ambiance. I hiked the mile-and-a-half bastion footpath instead.
Cruising into Kaatsheuvel, I find that the street on which my hotel is located is under construction. More detour signs. I can deal with that now.
The Hotel de Kroon is a two-star member of the Familie Hotels, an organization of moderately priced family-run hotels throughout the Netherlands that emphasize the personal touch. The place has four ninepin bowling lanes - very popular with the locals.
Renee Staal and Cees van de Vreede are the proprietors. She fixed a couple of sandwiches and a salad for me for dinner - the restaurant wasn't open - and refused to accept payment. Most unusual hospitality. Rooms here are $62 double, buffet breakfast included.
Day 3. Nothing but back roads for me today. This is Saturday and the Dutch are out in droves, mostly on bicycles. It's not unusual to see 20 or 30 of them traveling in a pack. The bikes aren't multi-speed racing machines or thick-tired trail bikes. Just utilitarian klunkers.
I travel through little village after little village, all built around a towering church steeple, with tidy little brick houses and immaculately manicured little lawns with flowers and shrubs and hedges. All of these villages have a clearly defined beginning and end, unlike in America. There's no sprawl, no roadside clutter.
Trees line the roadway, forming a canopy overhead. On either side there is a bike path. Occasionally there are thick woods with little underbrush - signs warn of deer crossings - but mostly the countryside is flat, open farmland with an occasional large brick barn. Lots of handmade signs advertising ``verse asperges.''
I have two pleasant surprises ahead of me: One is that my destination for the evening, the village of Thorn, is an ancient one-time royal duchy so amazingly picturesque that it could be a movie set; the other is that my hotel, the picturebook Hostillerie La Ville Blanche, has an all-asparagus menu. This is asparagus country. White asparagus. And it's in season.
Thorn, with the Belgian border its southern boundary and the River Mass on its east, grew up around around the abbey church, which dates from the 10th century. It's called the ``white town'' because all of its historic buildings and cottages are painted a dazzling white in honor of the virgin sisters who inhabited the convent.
Almost every building I see is white, with dainty lace curtains behind spic-and-span windows. Everyone in Holland does windows. Every Monday. That's sort of a tradition.
Almost the entire town of 2,700 inhabitants, where the streets are paved with a mosaic of black cut cobblestones and brown, rounded river rocks, has been declared a national monument. It's a popular tourist stop.
The asperge menu: smoked eel appetizer, asparagus soup, salmon with asparagus in white wine sauce and a beautiful desert of sherbets, fruits, whipped cream, confections and sweet sauce. Price: $27. Excellent food and service, well worth the price. The five-course ``menu of the month'' is $35, or $49 with wine.
The hotel building is more than 300 years old; a huge wooden beam, a foot square, runs across the ceiling of my room. A place with great atmosphere. Rates are $59 single, $86 double, including buffet breakfast.
Day 4. Somewhere on the road connecting Eindhover, Nijmegen and Arnhem, a single ultra-light aircraft creeps across the sky above me. Fifty years ago, come Sept. 17, thousands of planes and gliders swept across these skies in history's greatest airborne operation. It was called Market-Garden - Market for the airborne drop, Garden for the ground offensive that was to follow.
It was a brilliantly conceived plan that would open the door for the Allies to move into Germany. The American 101st Airborne Division would take the bridges around Eindhoven, the U.S. 82nd Airborne those around Nijmegen, and the British 1st Airborne those around Arnhem.
Brilliant plan, that is, if everything had gone according to plan. That didn't happen; it almost never does in military operations.
Bottom line was, they tried to go, as a British officer observed afterward, ``a bridge too far.'' Cornelius Ryan made the operation the subject of a best-selling book, which in turn became one of the great World War II movies.
I saw two motorcoaches filled with 82nd Airborne veterans wearing their red berets making their way along the route, looking for familiar sights. They were here after their remembrances at Normandy. I heard one of them say on television, ``I don't recall all these houses being here then. If they had been I wouldn't have been sleeping in a foxhole.''
No, much has changed here.
It's still chilling to cross the bridge at Arnhem - a replacement bridge, actually, that looks very much like the old one. This was the bridge too far. Lt. Col. John Frost and his British Tommies of the 2nd battalion, Parachute Regiment, tried for three days and four nights to take the span from superior German numbers. Then the ammo ran out.
The city was reduced to rubble. Only 145 of Arnhem's 28,000 houses were left untouched. Today the riverfront has an unattractively modern look. A BASF office building occupies the site of the house where Frost had his headquarters.
There will be 50th anniversary commemorations all along this route during September.
Just north of Arnhem is De Hoge Veluwe National Park, Holland's largest nature reserve - 30,000 acres of woodlands, heath, sand dunes and fens (admission $8 for car and driver). The park has 800 white bikes that visitors can use for free. I couldn't find a single one that wasn't already taken on this Sunday afternoon. Many, many other people bring their own bikes.
My alternative was a visit to the Kroller-Muller Museum in the park. It is world-famous for its van Gogh collection - I counted 63, including ``The Potato Eaters,'' the bearded ``Postman Roulin,'' an 1887 self-portrait, and ``La Berceuse,'' which is a fat lady.
Also on display are important paintings by Seurat, Picasso, Leger, Mondrian and some other people I don't know anything about.
There's also supposed to be a lot of red deer, foxes and wild boar here. I didn't see any animals. Only cyclists.
Just north of the park on the outskirts of the city of Apeldoorn is Het Loo (pronounced low) Palace, favorite summer residence of the royal family from 1686 when William and Mary moved in until 1975 when Juliana vacated the place for less lavish digs. The government spent $40 million for restoration and opened it to the public in 1986. It's become one of Holland's premier tourist attractions. The state rooms and formal gardens rank with those of other grand palaces in Europe.
Nearby at Gardenen is my final night's stop, Residence Groot Heideborgh, a brand new luxury hotel and spa on the edge of the national park. It's part of the Bilderberg Groep chain of fine hotels throughout Holland. What a grand place, the public rooms decorated with centuries-old antiques, the walls hung with prints and oil paintings; the cozy, quiet library features a large 15th century carved stone fireplace.
Rooms are $100 single, $127 double and $154 for suites, including buffet breakfast. Higher than other places I've stopped, but very good value for the dollar. And it's only an hour from Amsterdam, where comparable accommodations would run twice as much.
The lunch buffet is $22, a four-course dinner from $41. Sample dinner menu: Sweetbread salad appetizer, asparagus bouillon soup, veal with mustard and wine sauce and Belgian waffles prepared with Grand Marnier and orange cognac for dessert.
Tomorrow I'll return the car to Schiphol Airport. I recommend picking up and returning rental cars anywhere in Europe at an airport; avoid city traffic whenever possible. ILLUSTRATION: STEPHEN HARRIMAN/COLOR PHOTOS
The Hague, the center of Dutch government, was the first stop for
the author on his four-day driving tour across The Netherlands.
The windmills at Kinderdijk, which were built around 1740, stand
today as hulking sentinels of another age.
De Hoge Veluwe National Park has 800 bicycles that visitors can use
for free.
The fortified town of Heusden was laid out by a 16th century
military engineer.
Photo
STEPHEN HARRIMAN
Delft, the home of Delftware, features picturesque side streets.
Graphic
ABOUT DRIVING
All major U.S. rental companies are represented here as well as
European companies. Make arrangements ahead of time through a travel
agent, particularly if you have special requirements such as
automatic transmission. Most European cars have manual shift.
Gasoline is expensive - about $1 per liter (that's sort of like a
quart) or about $50 for a fill-up - but distances are small, so you
probably won't use as much.
Info: Netherland Tourist Board, 355 Lexington Ave., New York,
N.Y. 10017; (312) 819-0300.
by CNB