Category: Destinations

Maastricht is a town on a small handle of land that sticks down between Germany and Belgium. If you travel 20 kilometers east you are in Germany if you travel to the western city limits you are in Belgium and if you travel 20 kilometers south you are also in Belgium.

We had stopped near Maastricht on our third visit to Europe way back before Covid. We did not go into town, but had bookmarked it for a future trip. A quick bus ride from the campground deposited us on the riverfront in the center of town. The Maas River (in Belgium and France it is called the Meuse River) cuts thru the center of the city.

Most of the town is located on the west bank of the river which is where we were headed. It is an old town that dates back to the Celts around 500 BC. The Romans had a small town here. It became a major city in the middle ages and was a prosperous river trading city.

Today the town is a shopping destination for all three countries in the area. So we weren’t that surprised to find a bustling town. The weather was almost perfect with clear skies and temperatures in the low 70’s.

We started at the market and as usual enjoyed window shopping (or is it table shopping when there are no windows), but the market blocked all of the pretty photos, so after a while we moved on.

Maastricht was on the “border” between Catholic Europe and Protestant Europe during the reformation. As a result as you approach the main church in town it looks like one gigantic church. When you get closer you notice there is a small road splitting the building. It turns out there are two churches side by side, one with an interesting red tower is Protestant, and the larger one is Catholic.

Ton and I are both big fans of libraries and bookstores and today we found our most memorable one. The Dominican Church Book Store is in a repurposed 13th century church. It is spectacular, and we were both thrilled when we entered it.

We spent quite a while walking thru and exploring all of the corners of the store. We both thought that this was a wonderful use of a deconsecrated church.

The place was full of other people who were just as impressed and awed as we were. We could have spent the whole day there but I was getting hungry so we reluctantly left to find some local food. Finding places like this in small cities is one of the reasons I love traveling like we do.

On the way to lunch we saw the entrance for a church that did not look that special from the outside. We were glad we entered though as the magic of this church was on the inside. The Onze-Lieve Vrouwebasilik was much larger on the inside than it looked from the street. Not only did you get to visit the main church but you are allowed to visit the nice garden in the living area for the nuns who used to be here. It was another unexpected surprise delivered to us today.

We set out to find lunch and specifically a dish called Zuurvlees a stew that traditionally was made from horse meat but today is done in beef. The stew has a tangy sour taste and is quite dark. It is usually served with fried potatoes that you dip into the stew. We found a place serving it and ordered one for the two of us. It was delicious and just the right size for us to share.

After lunch we strolled around for a while people watching, and despite it being a Wednesday the people were out in force. As I said the sunshine and warm temperatures seemed to have everyone’s spirits up so it was a jolly crowd walking around town. After a while we crossed the Maas and walked to our bus stop for a trip back to François.

Today we completed our trip to Tilburg by visiting the site that put the city on our map. Just outside Tilburg is another Abbey brewery. The Brouwerij de Koningshoeven brews beer under the trademark La Trappe. When we were looking for a place to settle for Easter we picked Tilburg because of the Abbey brewery.

The brewery is relatively young. The Abbey was founded by French Monks who moved to the Netherlands in the 1880’s. They took over an abandoned royal hunting lodge. To help sustain the Abbey they began brewing beer. The beer caught on and turned into the major source of income for the monastery.

To be designated as an Abbey beer the production must meet three criteria. The beer must be produced on the ground of the Abbey. The beer must be produced by or supervised by a monk. And any profits from the beer must be given to charity.

The problem is that the number of monks is dwindling every year. At Konigshoeven there were 180 monks in the 1950’s. Today there are 18, and the average age is 66. The youngest monk is 35. Several other abbey breweries have lost their designation because they no longer had a monk on site due to death and retirement.

They produce 1 million liters of La Trappe beer per year which is a lot of beers for 18 monks. Today most of the work is done by non-monks. They also have a tie in with a corporation that causes some discomfort for purists.

At the end we were treated to a taste of the beer and it was delicious. Later in the day we did a comparison of the beer from here with a bottle we had from the Abbey we visited in Belgium. They were both delicious, and unique.

After the tour we finally started heading east and ended our day in Maastricht Netherlands, near the German (and Belgian) border. The afternoon was spent taking care of laundry which always makes us happy.

We mostly took Easter Sunday off. The wind was blowing a gale with occasional squalls of rain. We took the opportunity to sleep in, and then had a slow go at the morning.

The campground is located in reclaimed industrial land that was once a switch yard for the rail road. The park is large and wide open. It has been well used since we have been here. We spent most of the day watching hearty souls trying to have family picnics in a gale. It was pretty entertaining for us, maybe less so for the picnickers.

Yesterday when we walked by a big Albert Heijn they had a sign saying they were open 365 days per year which is unusual in Europe. Early in the afternoon we decided to test that statement and took a quick walk there. Even though we didn’t think that we needed anything we somehow ended up coming back with two full bags of groceries. That was the highlight of our Easter.

We checked out Tilburg today. It is the 5th largest city in the Netherlands. When the textile industry collapsed in the 1960’s the city went thru a period of modernization and one mayor in particular oversaw the razing of many of the older buildings in the city to replace them with “modern” buildings. His decision to tear down the historic city hall and replace it with a nine story black rectangle is particularly lamented now.

The skyline is filled with typical office towers and high rise apartments. We tend to like Dutch modern architecture a little better than what we see in the US, but it is still mostly tall rectangles.

Lately the city has been trying to repurpose the older buildings rather than tear them down. The best example is the city library which was built in an old locomotive repair building.

They have done a fantastic job of converting the interior of this industrial space into a modern and airy library. It retains some of the details from the old use including a 30 ton crane that was used to lift the locomotives. But the library space is well done and quite airy. Both Ton and I really enjoyed walking around the building and admiring the details that went into the conversion. This building is really unique. Ton really enjoys libraries and book shops and they are unfortunately becoming fewer and fewer in this digital age. This library is one of her favorites.

After we left the library we headed into the city center. Yesterday the town seemed kind of quiet, but Saturday brought out the local people and the town was much more vibrant. We were enjoying the town when we saw the main church and headed in. In a country that is mostly Protestant this part of the country is Catholic so we were curious to see the church.

As we entered a gentleman hit us with a quick blast of Dutch and as soon as he could tell it did not register he switched to English. Ton and I were talking about how spoiled we are in the Netherlands. Very few Dutch do not speak English well, and as a result we have learned almost no Dutch. Also, some of the common words are the same such Hello, and Sorry, words you usually learn in other languages.

To get back to the story, he told us there was a concert getting ready to start at the front of the church and we were welcome to sit in. A young cellist gave a very nice 45 minute concert that I really enjoyed. He was a very talented young man and did a terrific job. We were glad we walked in when we did.

Our next stop was the port in Tilburg. It is a river port as we are quite a way inland. It was a nice walk and they had a few interesting old canal boats docked there.

Walking back we came upon the Saturday market and Tons day was made. We spent a lot of time going from stand to stand and ended up with some rotisserie chicken, and white asparagus. We also indulged in what the Dutch call kibble, which is fried cod. The markets never disappoint over here.

After the market we decided to head back to François to enjoy our chicken and relax for the rest of the day.

We made our first move of the trip about 120 kilometers south to the college town of Tilburg. We are going to spend a few days in this area as our primary motivation is to visit the only Trappist Abby brewery in the Netherlands.

But because Easter is one of the major holidays in Europe we were nervous and pre-booked ourselves into a campground for the whole weekend. We have run into problems finding places to stay on Easter in Greece, Poland, and Spain so we didn’t want to take any chances. I thought I was booking us into a major campground, but it turns out to be a small but well appointed municipal aire. When we pulled up we were a little taken aback, as it is a single row of parking spaces that only holds about 10 RV’s wedged between a large apartment building and a very nice park.

The good news it is almost in the city center, and near the train station so we can use Tilburg as a base to go to a couple of near by towns. We may also take a day trip to Belgium to get cheaper Belgian fuel. The Netherlands has the highest fuel prices in Europe and the price has exploded since the Iran war. Today we saw fuel between €2.50 and 2.80 per liter, which is well north of $10 per gallon.

We both slept well last night so a trip into the city center seemed in order. Ton found a new place for us to check out called NDSM.

The temperature had fallen compared to the last two days so we bundled up and headed downtown. The nice thing about this campground is access to the city center is quite simple. It is located at the end of the line for one of the metro lines and the trip to the main train station is only 15 minutes. Once downtown we needed to take one of the free ferries across the river to NDSM.

NDSM is a new artist cooperative on the grounds of an old ship repair facility. The old repair buildings have been converted into artists workshops. We could only visit part of the facility as a major tech convention is going to take place on the site next week and a lot of exhibitions were being set up.

One of the old buildings had been converted to the worlds largest “street art” museum. We walked around the outside, but I balked at the €21.50 entrance fee so we did not go inside. I suspect Ton would have loved it, so now I have non-buyers remorse as I write this.

The other main building contains about 20 artist studios with different kind of art being produced. Ton really enjoyed walking around and looking at the outside of the studios. They are working studios so the public is not allowed inside, you walk thru the old shipyard looking at the art on the outside of the studios.

A lot of the old equipment and catwalks from the buildings previous life as a ship repair building were in still in place. I found myself drawn to the equipment and envisioning how the repairs flowed thru the building. My time working in automobile plants makes these kind of buildings fascinating to me.

The repurposing of the industrial site as artist studios had me a little conflicted. I guess most people would see this as an upgrade from the previous use as a shipyard. I found myself wondering if the original work wasn’t just as interesting as the current work, and if the stories of the shipyard workers wouldn’t be just as interesting as those of the artists currently occupying the space. I guess I am a bit of a dinosaur who misses old fashioned manufacturing as a statement of skill and intellectual knowledge on par with more “intellectual” work.

After NDSM we headed to the second best apple pie in Amsterdam. The Netherlands is rightly recognized as having some of the best apple pie in the world. Last year we went to the apple pie place that was supposed to be the best in Amsterdam. After some debate and searching our memory, I decided that today’s apple pie while being very good and worth the walk, was indeed second best. Ton, couldn’t decide so declared a tie, but pronounced Dutch apple pie better than American apple pie in general.

It was gray, cold and blustery so the walks were done with a sense of purpose and directness we might not have had on a nicer day. But Amsterdam remains a beautiful city to walk in.

Our final walk was to a brewery located in an old nunnery in the infamous red light district of Amsterdam. The nunnery was founded in the 1400’s to offer sanctuary to women of bad reputation who wanted to turn their lives around. This made me wonder if the current red light district goes back to the 1400’s also. The nuns brewed beer to help pay for upkeep of the nunnery. Their beer was in high demand, so when the nunnery was winding up operations they sold their recipes to a private party who continued brewing the beer.

The brewery was the last stop of the day, and even better was located just around the corner from a stop on our train line. We returned to the busy campground and had a light dinner to make up for our huge piece of apple pie.

There was some activity today, but not particularly interesting activity. The day was spent provisioning for the upcoming trip. One of the reasons we like Amsterdam as a base is there are two excellent large Asian groceries near the campground we stay at.

We are now fully stocked up with Thai and other Asian, sauces, spices, and noodles. We also picked up some frozen fish balls which are an important ingredient in a lot of Thai noodle dishes. One of the groceries also has barbecue pork in their deli that Ton has declared the best she has tasted outside of Thailand.

After taking care of our Asian food needs we headed over to an Albert Heijn which is one of the biggest grocery store chains in the Netherlands. After an hour we found ourselves well stocked with the other necessities of life like milk, bread, eggs, and meat.

We then headed back to the campground where Ton played Tetris with our little refrigerator and our limited shelf space. She somehow manages to squeeze an amazing amount of stuff into a little bit of space.

I spent time trying to figure out why the toilet was not dispensing water, unfortunately I was not successful. It looks like the pump may have seized up so a stop at a RV dealer is in our future.

We are still fighting a bit of jet lag, but we are thinking a sojourn into Amsterdam proper may be in the cards for tomorrow.

We did not leave the campground today. We are both jet lagged from yesterday but it is hitting us differently. Ton woke up in the middle of the night and tossed and turned. She finally fell asleep near dawn and slept in until about 10. I slept thru the night, but crashed about 1 pm until 4:30 pm.

We took a walk in the evening and did a census of the vans in the campground. About 250 vans in a campground that holds 450, but it is only March. The population is about 85% German, and there are more kids than normal so we are guessing German schools are on Easter holiday.

The top picture is of the automatic pizza machine that was doing a booming business as we went by. Also, since we were here last they have automated the camp store so there are no humans. You punch a code to get into the store, and pick what you want and checkout at a automatic cashier. I guess this is progress. They have also added an automatic check in machine, though they do open their reception for limited hours of the day for the old timers who prefer to interact with humans.

We traveled to Amsterdam to start our spring trip. The trip today was the smoothest ever. This time we routed ourselves Portland to New York to Amsterdam. The flight from Portland was early and we arrived earlier than usual due to all the TSA troubles from the government shutdown. There was no line at all so we were through in record time. Both of the flights arrived very early so our tight connection in New York become a comfortable connection. Our flight to Amsterdam arrived 45 minutes early and we were one of the first international flights of the day so there was no line at immigration and we were through in under 10 minutes. If all travel days could be so smooth…

We had contacted our storage place to see what time we could arrive. They told us to come as early as we like. They said they would leave the keys in a place that is easy to find but pretty secure. Our Uber driver was a nice guy from Morocco.

The upshot was we arrived at François at 6:15 am. The only glitch was the earliest we could check into the campground was noon. We spent the next three hours unpacking our bags and the plastic boxes we store our left over food in to deter mouse invasions. When I say we the distribution of work is about 90% Ton and 10% Ron.

About 9:15 Ton declared close enough. We decided to take a nap until 10:30 and then head over to Lidl for our first shopping of this trip. We arrived at the campground at high noon and joined a line of 5 German vans. But the check in went quickly and we were parked up 15 minutes after arrival.

Today was as easy as it gets when transiting two countries.

Our fall trip ended as they all do when we dropped François off at the storage. We had plenty of time in the morning to wrap up a few things to prepare François. The place we stayed in Stein was nice, a lot of farmers in the Netherlands seem to have set up side businesses as campgrounds. This one is nice and very new. It made for a good place to spend the last few days.

The one issue with the small campgrounds is that in all three we have stayed at the final kilometer or two to get there are on dike roads. Netherlands is rightfully famous for its systems of pumps and dikes that have allowed it to reclaim a lot of land. This land makes for great farm land. The dikes are pretty tall and narrow and usually there is water on one side. The single lane on top is two way and there are pull outs to allow vehicles to pass. People manage to get around each other using the pull outs and driveways of the farms and homes .

As we were leaving google routed us on a dike road for about 7 kilometers. We were doing fine until I came to a point where there were road signs saying restricted to vehicles less than 2.2 meters wide. François is about 2.4 meters wide. I sat there contemplating what to do. The narrow road did get a slight bit narrower but I thought we would make it. At that point luck intervened and a tractor pulling farm equipment went by me that was wider than François. I took off after him figuring if he could make it we certainly could and I had the added benefit of having him clear other traffic out of the way as long as I stayed close.

Things were going well until I saw a line of cars going the same direction as us stopped on the dike ahead. After a few minutes of idling I saw the farmer get out of the tractor and go ahead to see what was going on. He came back in a few minutes and asked me to follow him into a drive way to get out of the road. We both had to back across a narrow bridge into someones driveway.

He then set off to help direct traffic while Ton and I talked to the owner of the home whose driveway we had occupied. After 20 minutes or so the farmer came back and asked if I could move further down the road to another farm. When we got to the farm we had to get a couple of cars to move so we could go back by the barn and turn around. With the help of the owner of the farm we turned François around and when we were pointed in the right direction the semi-truck had gone by and it was smooth sailing. This whole event took about an hour, and I was impressed about how nonchalant everyone was about the whole thing, the homeowner and farmer were totally nonplussed to have us show up on their property. I guess it happens enough that they are used to it.

The rest of the day was uneventful.

This is always my least favorite day of the trip. Ton spends most of the day packing our bags. I try to help where I can but am mostly useless except to occasionally lift something heavy. Tonight we will be our last night in François for this trip.

One unexpected complication for this trip that I realized today is the fact that we left the Schengen zone when we were in Morocco. This means our 180 day clock restarted when we reentered Spain on October 20, not when we arrived in Amsterdam on September 7. This means our spring trip will have to start later or be shorter than normal. I will be spending more time than normal over the winter using Schengen travel calculators to decide on flight dates. That is a bit of a bummer.

Well after procrastinating as long as we could we finally turned north and are now near Amsterdam. The two places we normally stay at around Amsterdam have both shortened their season and are closed, so I picked a place open year round at random. It is a nice small campground on a farm-and it turns out a historical site.

At the site of the campground there used to be a monastery that for a few years was the home of the philosopher and scholar Erasmus. In the mid-1400’s he was a leading philosopher within the Catholic Church. Before he got to that point he spent several years in Stein as a poor monk in a monastery that used to occupy the site our campground is on. He is a big enough deal in Europe that the program within the EU that allows students to attend any University in the EU no matter their nationality is called the Erasmus project.

We arrived early and Ton spent a couple of hours sorting thru what is going to stay and what is going to get packed tomorrow. I contributed little except to explore the campground and the immediate surrounding areas where I learned about Erasmus.

After Ton had everything sorted we set off to find an ATM as we need some Euros to pay for François’ storage for next year. After accomplishing that we returned to François for a big supper. We have a lot of food to eat in the next day and a half before we head to the hotel at the airport.