I'm embarassed to say that it's taken me ten months to learn the first commandment of navigating in the Netherlands: Thou shalt not underestimate the impeding power of water.
John recently escaped the pressing gloom of fall in Nijmegen with a strategically planned work trip to Argentina. By work trip, I mean two weeks of spending all day out on the sunny pampas and all evening eating Argentinean steak and drinking Malbec.
I'm thinking that I should change the focus of my job search to pursue something with lots of "work trips."
Luckily for me, the planets and the vagaries of the airline industry aligned in such a way that my mother was able to come and visit during the same two weeks.
After arriving early on Saturday morning, she's been gamely battling jet lag, joining me on my circuit of favorite Dutch thrift stores, and surrendering to the roulette wheel of my cooking skills.
Fortunately for me, I have a mother who is perfectly happy knitting while I mutter to myself and try to write cover letters and blog entries. So: so far, so good!
Today brought an unexpected day of sunshine, so we set off on foot toward the nature reserve just south of where we live. We walked and walked and walked and walked and walked. And then we walked some more.
We logged most of our kilometers after deciding to strike out for Persingen, whose claim to fame is that with 89 residents, it's the smallest town in the Netherlands.
Let me pause here to point out that until you've seen the smallest town in the Netherlands, you really haven't lived.
By "deciding to strike out for Persingen", what I mean is that I said something like, "why don't we head over to Persingen?" in a tone of voice that suggested that a) I knew how to get there, and b) walking there would be a reasonable undertaking for the afternoon.
In one sense, it's easy to navigate in the Netherlands because everything is so flat and you can see exactly where you want to go. For example, the tiny red church in the middle of Persingen:
In another sense, it's impossible to navigate because you can see where you want to go, but there are all of these goddamned — ahem, I mean lovely! — moats and canals and rivers and streams between you and your destination:
(And even when there aren't sanctioned bodies of water, chances are good that you will get stuck in swampy, marshy fields if you try to strike out on your own.)
First, we spent a fair amount of time walking away from Persingen in order to cross two large, water-filled ditches in order to head back toward Persingen.
We then found what seemed to be a direct path across the polder to Persingen, only to be stopped by the second commandment of navigating in the Netherlands: Thou shalt not pretend that thou doesn't understand what verboden toegang means.
In the interest of not angering Dutch farmers (or their livestock), we set off in the other direction to try to find another, less forbidden path.
Now we were walking away from Persingen again, with no immediate options for a more direct route. But then we started to see hand-lettered signs directing us to a "Pontje". I had absolutely no idea what a pontje was, but it sounded a lot more fun and promising than verboden toegang, so we went with it.
We hiked along a winding, muddy path next along a marshy pond (could that be the pontje?), past a guy picking berries (could that be the pontje?) and then over a small wooden bridge (could that be the pontje?). But the path kept going and going until lo and behold, shining in the afternoon sunlight, stood The Pontje: a small ferry to get us across the Meertje and on our way back toward Persingen.
By ferry, I mean a metal boat shaped like a cage, with a hand-operated crank that one can use to coax the hulking contraption along its cable.
Verboden toegang notwithstanding, I really do love the Dutch.
The only catch was this: after our triumphant (and necessarily brief) tour of Persingen, we headed west along the Meertje and back toward Nijmegen, trying to outrun some ominous fog bearing down on us from the east.
But now we were on the wrong side of the Meertje with no pontje in sight. So we walked and walked and walked until we returned to civilization.
And by civilization, I mean the closest bridge.
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