During my lovely bike holiday in Gelderland last year, I showed you many parts of this photo from ground level. I took this photo during a December flight from Amsterdam to Doha (en route to Bangladesh, for the trip from which you’re still seeing Longest Beach photos, fyi), when I noticed the clouds had cleared enough to show me: from the left to center, the first branches of the Rhine after it enters NL (further explanations in last year’s post), and at the bottom some of the hilly landscapes of the Veluwe Zoom national park, of which we showed many posts including this one, last year. In the gallery below is a zoomed-in view that shows a bit more detail of the hilly park landscapes. Rest of the photos are all from the NL and DE parts of that flight.
I believe this little lake was once a quarry. As seen during a morning bike ride in the Utrechtse Heuvelrug. We’ve shown you another view of this lake once before.
That’s a bust of the last emperor of Germany, with the house here in NL where he lived his last decades in exile in the background. Various photos and trinkets from the interior, including if you choose to look closely a photo taken the year before WWI started, at someone royal’s wedding in Berlin, at which most crowned heads and other non-crowned heads of state and / or government from European states which would soon be losing a generation of lives and a great deal of money in that war, were all at the same dinner table in apparent ease and peace. Since I happened to be there a few weeks after US tax dollars began flooding out of the accounts for more war and destruction again instead of education and healthcare, this struck me, somehow, as another example of simple lessons of history that seem never to settle in the brains of our voting publics or those they choose to elect. There’s also a fascinating little toilet cupboard of sorts, probably installed so as to avoid a bigger remodel or something?
So either the modern-day curators who set the scenes in currently or formerly royal-affiliated homes have a taste for odd and interesting knicknacks…or it’s been a general trend in at least Euro-royal types to accumulate odd and interesting knicknacks. Herewith several examples from Huis Doorn.
Sad lessons one might choose to learn about war, its consequences and the end of dynastic rule from Huis Doorn, where the second and last emperor of the short-lived late 1800’s – early 1900’s German Empire lived out his last years in exile. Such an odd notion, really, royalty, when you stop and think about it, eh? Absolute rule, too, if you ask me: bad policy, full stop.
There are several pieces of infrastructure that bridge water in this post from the Vaartse Rijn train station in Utrecht, where I happened to be a few weeks ago while visiting some friends recently out of hospital in various parts of NL. None of these various forms of “bridge” are for cars. Just above, you see the Vaartse Rijn going generally left to right, and a side canal heads up to the top and left, bridged by a bike and foot bride into the station area. The trains themselves cross on the elevator tracks in the top right corner, and passengers get to and from those tracks on stairs, some of which also cross the water itself. I do so love living in a country that spends money on non-automotive infrastructure!
(so much world, so little time....) 