We were off early in the morning. We both woke up early and since it was too cold out to relax much we decided to get an early start on our drive. Just as we pulled on to the autobahn near Aachen I noticed a police car driving slowly in the middle lane with his lights on. Behind the police was a long line of cars slowly following him. The car just in front of us got on in front of the police and took off at normal speed. But I merged in right behind the police and was first in line traveling slowly.
We followed along at a little more than walking pace for a couple of hundred yards when the police car stopped and two officers got out and began walking beside the car checking out the vegetation in the median and along the side of the road. They were obviously looking for someone. We then noticed that there was a police car with two officers on the other side of the autobahn approaching us doing the same thing. We also noticed there were about 15 police cars on a country toad that passed under the autobahn. So someone had gotten the attention of a large number of police officers on a Saturday morning. Eventually the search party on both sides of the autobahn met each other without flushing out anything. The six officers had a little conference and then reopened the autobahn.
We will never know what happened, but it was an interesting way to start the day. The rest of our drive to Utrecht was uneventful and we arrived at the campground a couple of hours later only to a see a sign in 4 languages saying they were full.
Since it was early in the day I decided to stick my head into the office and see if they meant it. The guy asked if I was picky about my spot and I said not today. He explained that they had had very heavy rain last weekend and the grass spots were kind of muddy, but if I was comfortable with one I could use it.
I grabbed Ton and we walked in to take a look at the spots on the grass. The road in was a little rutted up but pretty dry and the spots on the grass felt pretty firm so we decided it was ok. I did spin the wheels once backing into the spot but didn’t dig in too bad.
Utrecht is the third largest city in the Netherlands and the home to a famous university. Like every city here it is clean, and full of solidly built homes. As we were walking Ton and I were talking about our impressions of the cities in the Netherlands. The cities are very nice, they look like they would be a great place to live, but they are all very similar. Our conclusion is that Dutch cities are probably a great place to live, but are fairly monotonous to visit. For our Dutch friends that is said with the emphasis on a great place to live.
The day was foggy and we kept wishing the fog would burn off, but it never completely did. But, despite the damp and the chill the center of Utrecht was hopping. We had one destination in mind after we spent some time taking in the sites.
We noticed that most of the churches in Utrecht have been converted to museums. Our destination was one of those converted churches but this one has been converted into a beer hall.
The setting of the beer hall was very nice and it was packed. We were lucky that a couple had just gotten up when we walked in and we were able to snag their table. They specialize in Belgian beer so we were able to revisit a couple of our favorite beers from earlier in the trip. It was a nice way to end an interesting, but ultimately uneventful day.