This trip is built upon my years-long desire to finally visit both the Hoge Veluwe National Park (largest in NL, meaning probably comparable in size to Manhattan), and the Kröller-Müller museum which sits inside it. The museum is most famous for its large collection of Van Gogh painting as well as other beloved 20th century painters. I’d known it has a sculpture garden, but not quite how park-like and wonderful the garden is. It’s spawned a new series for me, because I spent today surrounded by nature both in the museum grounds looking at sculpture, and outside on my bike ride before the museum opened. More from the inside (and outside) later, but here a some introductory tastes of the museum’s sculpture park.
Even before I got into the Hoge Veluwe park and its renowned Kröller Müller museum this afternoon, I enjoyed the loveliest 15km or so bike ride through forest and field with nary a car in view, en route from the train station nearest to the geographic center of NL with easy onward paths to Otterlo. I’ve now spent three hours in the fantastic museum and its magnificent extensive sculpture park, and am very glad indeed that I can go back both tomorrow and Tuesday. An excellent start to Paul’s low carbon footprint countryside adventure. If things go as planned, I’ll explore the park and various surrounding towns – two more overnight destinations to go once I leave here on Wednesday – entirely by foot and bike, til next Sunday at which point I’ll be on train back to Amsterdam. Two additional points of note: it’s very agricultural and lots of horses here, which I’m guessing is why the main paths through the woods are sandy and unsealed, with only the narrower bike path sealed. The motorized farm vehicles can navigate sand, and it’s kinder on the horses’ hooves, I assume. Also: yes, there are hills! 🙂
Lumphini Park, Bangkok – last month. I’ve had so much work travel both short and long-haul this year that I’ve decided for this current vacation to stay put in NL. This morning I’m off for a mostly-bike domestic exploration of areas I’ve intended to visit for years, so I’m taking the rather bold step of making this my last post using older photos, and for at least the balance of this week ahead you’ll only see pics I’ve taken here in NL while on this journey. Bold b/c it means I risk missing a day, and as you know I rather enjoy doing dailies. This morning is a bike ride to the train station then a train with one connection and about an hour bike ride at the end to the place I’ll be staying for the next three days. More about that once I arrive!
Last snowy-landscape shots from the Snowhotel Kirkenes, in Norway’s Finnmark county. Above, we’re looking out from the lovely big windows in the dining room over the frozen, snow-covered fjord that runs south from the harbor, on which we also did our King Crab outing that day. At the bottom of this post, for those interested, is a panorama of the compound in which you can see, at the far left, a conical-roofed cafe building which is next the sled dog kennels (shared in our prior post from Kirkenes), then the larger modern glass & brick structure that houses check-in and tour-group visits (tour groups do short trips for the King Crab, Husky Sled Dogs, etc.), then the heated modern lodge hotel building with rounded roofs up the hill from left to right, then the large bulk of the actual frozen Snowhotel itself (where we slept on our ice beds), and at the far right the building with restaurant, sauna, changing and warming lounge reserved for overnight snowhotel guests.
Below, some of the older city wall entrances from the Esquiline neighborhood I stayed in during my short June Rome visit, and above a lovely shaded walkway across the street from the park called Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II.
The Snowhotel Kirkenes sits, of course, in Norway’s northernmost Finmark County. And houses both reindeer (whom one can feed) and huskies (whom one can pet).
(so much world, so little time....) 