Worldly Chatter

Well today I had a run in a town called Vreeland and Nederhorst den Berg. These are two small towns, one is a fishing village and the other is a mass of farmland. I am not a girl who grew up with cows, coats and chickens all around me but today when I was delivering mail with a coworker in the van I nearly kicked a chicken because a bunch of them were moving about the front door! Yet my day ended with the cows sleeping alongside the road and goats eating while we drove to the next house. It started with the little village and these roads; tiny crazy loopy roads. Vreeland is a village in the province of Utrecht. It sits on a river and has farm land surrounding it. According to Wiki the village has 1600 inhabitants. This is a well to do area and the cars and homes are rather large in some areas. It is also a very old village. It received city rights in 1265 so you can imagine how this place was designed. The roads are curvy and strange and are very narrow in most places. While I was delivering my mail today I came across a maze of streets! I had one street where others went into it… but behind this street were streets that twisted into each other, some no more than a few homes in it while others were long enough to cover two blocks worth and wrapped around other streets! I admit right here and right now that the one thing I cannot stand about this country are its roads! I miss the grid system and I do not know how to get my brain to wrap around this twisty maze like streets that I just do not understand! I have a map of the place I am to ride through, it has most of the names on it and I think I can do this right. Well for one thing, half way through my run, my bike got a flat so I walked a good chunk of it, another thing was that despite having a map I couldn’t understand where one road ended, and another began. Where one road was when according to the map as I was reading it, the street I was on should have been something else!
With all the things I love about this country and am excited to learn about, their roads leave much to be desired! I am trying to follow it, make sense of the maze I have found myself in for the third day now and I still get frustrated, stand their irritated and feel lost and alone. For example, Koeidijlaan is a street I do not understand. You have street A going —— and Koeidijklaan runs south of street A. But! And this is an interesting but. I ran out of house numbers for the mail I still had. I went through the whole street and couldn’t find it. Where are these houses? I will tell you where they are; they are the next street over! It runs off street A just as the first one but the next street over where to my brain should be an entirely different street name! How do you get used to where streets are if they follow no pattern?
When I was done with Vreeland my coworker picked me up with the company van and we headed to Nederhorst den Berg. These are roads that are so long with houses so spaced that it’s ridiculous to ask any cyclist to run it so we head down the roads and drive the mail house to house. Cows, goats, chickens and farmland as far as my eye can see! It’s a good thing I took my allergy pills! I have never been so close to farmland before in my life! Cows in abundance! Absolutely beautiful, like right out of a painting it was that beautiful and picturesque. We would drive a few minutes before we found the next house and then we had to drive 5 kilometers to get to the next street. My day was long and tiring; beautiful but aggravating. I really do like my job it’s just these runs that we have to do that get me so flustered! I simply cannot get the layout of these towns! Chaos, just chaos to my brain!

Vreeland, Netherlands, Dutch Roads, worldly chatter, Nederland, Nederhorst den Berg