Anotherblog

Some pics of Enschede and Rennes

So, here are some of those pics, courtesy of Craig N.:

The hotel in Enschede. Each floor was done according to some overall theme, and our floor was “art”. The carpet was horribly reminiscent of “The Shining”, however.

Yup, pretty amazing. Note the alarm clock on the wall.

The Dutch are pretty keen on cycling. There were separate bike lanes on almost every road, separate traffic lights – and in this case, a completely separate lane on the roundabout. Cars had to give way to bikes at pretty much every point, here.

We had a half free-day on Friday, and went cycling to view a windmill. Note that the bike path here is solid and smooth, while the road for cars (and horses, it must be admitted) is rutted and primitive.

We cycled through some forest. Purty.

Blackberries. You may note that the berries are, in fact, red. This is because they are not ripe. There were some ripe ones, but they were covered in cobwebs. We abstained.

As requested, some pictures of cows. Hooray for cows! I think the things on their necks are bells, though they were very oddly shaped and didn’t make much sound.

Craig has an excellent sense of direction, which was lucky, because the way to the windmill had been very twisty and turny. Much to our surprise, the windmill was on an actual hill, and not a manmade little mound either. Not that it was a tiring ride up or a perilous zoom down, though.

The windmill was quite interesting. I had never noticed before that the bodies of dutch windmills are often thatched, or that the sails on the windmill can be furled back, leaving the wooden slats, or that there was a complicated counterweight/locking mechanism that let the windmill head swivel to catch the wind but not be pushed sideways. It looked clever.

On to Rennes (there are lots more photos, but it’s a bit of work converting them all). The centre of the city burned down a couple of hundred years ago, so examples of these tudor-style wooden buildings only exist in the outskirts of the old city. But they’re pretty cool, and very leany.

Some of the locals managed to get us to sit down and drink with them at 10:00am. They had been going since the previous night, and were very, very rowdy. They were helping people to park, and then rating them on their parking prowess, as evidenced in this photo.