Finishing off the vaguely Dutch theme of the last few days with an actual windmill from Amsterdam. Amsterdam was a day trip: we were staying in Leiden and it was our first foreign holiday together since our honeymoon. (Really? Six years? But then there really wasn’t much money to spare for most of them.)
Most of our recent foreign holidays have been to the Low Countries. There’s a good reason for that: we only started gathering some disposable income once we’d moved to Cambridgeshire, because that was where one of the jobs was. Add to that my reluctance to fly (it’s not that I’m never flying again, but I’m going to need a very good reason indeed), a shared interest in cycling, and the proximity of the Harwich ferry and the Eurostar, and it becomes obvious that we’d visit Leiden, then Ghent, then Lille.
(Solo trips are another matter. More on that tomorrow. And we are still holding out for that rail tour alongside the Rhine.)
I wasn’t massively keen on Amsterdam. My experience throughout my travels (again, more on that tomorrow, probably) has been that I prefer the smaller cities. But I did like the Netherlands more generally, and I’d like to go back sometime when All This is under control. In the meantime, I’m exploring my own flat land.
Kathleen Jowitt 