Reflections of My Travel

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This morning we slept in a little before circling back around Amsterdam toward the North Sea. We took a nice stroll along the beach at Egmond aan Zee. It wasn’t as nice a beach as most of our Florida beaches. The sand was a dark brown sand. It was fairly fine though, not shelly or rocky. The water was very dark, brackish. The waves, while we were there at least, were small. They seemed to be working on some beach reclamation project. We enjoyed our windy walk on the beach. The beach does, after all, hold many significant memories for us. When we left, we headed north to drive along the long land barrier bridge that they created to keep Holland from flooding again. It was an impressive land barrier, indeed. Somewhere along the way, we experienced another kind of unusual overpass. We were driving along and noticed sailboats crossing over the autobahn up ahead. I really wish we had been going a little slower that I could have gotten a picture. The overpass was a canal, but of course, all you could see from our vantage point was that there were sailboats passing overhead. Quite a strange sight to partake of. Along the way, we thoroughly enjoyed the incredible displays of tulip fields all along the roads. Simply awesome. Huge fields planted solid with rows and rows of perfectly pristine tulips. Red, orange, yellow, pink, white, purple, blue, maroon, multi-colors… absolutely incredible! I’ve never really had a favorite flower, but I am now completely enamored with tulips. There were also plenty of the old windmills that are so symbolic of Holland. We stopped to take a tour of one of these impressive structures. It amazed me that 400 years ago they were building such complex wooden systems to pump water. The windmill itself I found creepy. It was about 4 stories and the steps were very short, steep steps. Because everything in the structure was made of wood, including all the gears and such, it was very creaky. By the time I had climbed all of the very, very steep steps to the top, it was very loud and gave me the creeps. I figured it would be a good setting for a B horror flick. It was very interesting though. And, as I said, very impressive. We left the windmill and continued along our way, stopping for our best meal in 3 days – yep, McDonalds! I can’t begin to tell you how wonderful it was to drink some Fanta®. It was the next best thing to having water that tastes like nothing. I’ll never understand how Europeans can drink that horrid tasting water. After our very satiating lunch, we made our way back into Germany, yet another unceremonious crossing, but it was very good to be back where I could read the signs again. Today was a long drive day. We ended up driving back across the country. But this was the first day that we really experienced the fast side of the autobahn. So far, I’d say that speeds have averaged about 85-90mph. Today was the first time that it got to what I considered blatant speeding. Randal fell into a fast crowd that was going 215kph, which is roughly 133mph. Cars there are just built for speed. Our little Ford station wagon was a 6 speed, straight shift, diesel and it didn’t go into sixth gear until about 90 mph. Anyhow, it was a good day to have good traffic and high speeds since we were just driving across the country and our drive time to do so was significantly reduced. We are camping just outside of Dresden.