Amsterdam, Helmond

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3. Amsterdam, Helmond

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Took the train to Helmond, about two hours south with a change in Eindhoven. There is one fantastically large modern windmill along this route — like the ones on the Altamont Pass in California, but with blades maybe 20 times longer. They say it makes quite a noise if you're near it. Despite being such a small country, Holland also has lots of open space and farmland. I see a lot of cows, and they all appear to be happy cows, as they say in California, with lots of grass and space to roam around in. Nothing like what you see on I-5 with its big, smelly factory farms. In general, one of the best things about Europe seems to be that the large corporation has a noticeably more limited influence over life here, and the profit motive is clearly not the only driving force. Perhaps this is economically inefficient, but it certainly is nice, if it's true and not just a reflection of the fact that I'm on vacation.

Why Helmond? I met a friend who lives here — we first met on the Tibetan biking trip I did last year. So biking was called for, and Holland has great, flat paths for it everywhere (well, maybe it's a bit too easy after Everest base camp, but what are you going to do?). If I hadn't planned to meet him, I might have tried the Hogue Veluwe National Park to the east. We rode enough to get pretty tired. There are even little mountain bike parks scattered in the woods, with lots of little ups and downs which can be quite fun and even technical. Towards the end we actually rode up a 100m hill which is also a mountain bike park! This being Holland, it isn't actually a natural hill — it's a giant trash heap accumulated over the centuries! But it's covered with nice grassy soil, and you get views all the way to Belgium and Germany. There is also a poorly engineered hanging observation deck — if you're skinny like me you can squeeze through the bars of the locked gate and walk out to the platform, otherwise it's a climb round the edge, which I found a bit scary but lots of people were doing it. To my surprise, we found only a rather sad decaying windmill along our route. But at the end there were very yummy pancakes — in Holland these are thin, flat, and large, filled with apples or ham or other things, and they're eaten at any meal of the day except not usually at breakfast! My friend has a nice house, a few times bigger than my condo in San Francisco, but at half the price! So not everywhere has experienced the insane property bubble of the US, Britain, and other countries.

Back to Amsterdam in the evening, I met a set of four twenty-something guys from the Bay Area, who I would amazingly keep running into all over the place later on (and this was always a complete surprise because the one I mostly talked to was not at all in charge of the travel plans and had surprisingly little idea where they were headed). I suppose it's a small continent after all.

I did experience some jet lag going to Europe — it took a number of days before I could really fall asleep at a reasonable hour. For the first two weeks or so, I often had a nightmare in which I was walking down the street in San Francisco. Pleasant enough, but then I would realize that for some reason I had had to go home early — and as a result I had missed Italy and Greece! It all seemed very real until I would wake up the next morning and find to my relief that I was still in Europe at the beginning of my trip. Later in the trip, I would have dreams where I would seem to wake up and think that I was in a dark place, usually in the same country but very different from the room I was actually in. Probably the psychic dislocation of moving from place to place so frequently, I suppose.

Jonathan's Travel Blog :: Europe

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