Tooling around the Netherlands



The valley of the River Maas and the modern city of Maastrict.  Where else could one see church spires and cooling towers in the same panorama? 

This is our (Boogaloo's and my own) last weekend in the Netherlands, so we resolved to catch up on some things that slipped through our figners.  We spent Saturday in the St. Pietersberg caves, which aren't actually caves.  Our tour guide Paul made that quite clear.  The caves were limestone mines dating back to the 1200s because Maastrict is part of a prehistoric ocean scene that gave birth to a huge limestone plateau stretching all the way from Germany to the white cliffs of Dover, UK.  The River Maas put a hole in one side of the plateau and the River Jager cut up the other side, making Mt. St. Pietersberg in the middle.  Then the Romans came up the river Maas and put a city there.  "So," as our guide told us, "when people tell you that Maastrict is hill country, they are wrong.  It is actually [river] valley country." 

Fort St. Pietersberg, named after the mountain from which it was carved.  The fort was built in the days of Napoleon. 

The limestone mines around Maastrict stretch all the way into Belgium.  They have been used to smuggle soldiers and refugees during war time and butter, bread and wine in peace time, but originally, they were the source of the primary building material of the area. 

A drawing of the miner at work.  It must have been lonely work,
 not to mention the dangers of cave ins, getting lost, and hypothermia.
And yet it was their daily bread and butter.  Boggles the mind, doesn't it.  

Limestone is too expensive now, but it used to be the building material of choice, shipping as far as Austria.  Miners quarried out two to three 1x3 foot blocks a day (per person), slowly carving their way in.  When they had cut out as much as they could safely cut (before incurring "a short headache which you will never get again," said our guide), they cut the next layer down. Finally, when the cost of limestone made it obsolete, a vast labyrinth of eight foot wide tunnels existed under the ground. 

The limestone they didn't dare cut away. 

A child's drawing on the walls of the mines. 

After the mines were closed, they became a kind of communal property where people would go to reflect or wander or smuggle (I'm sure you can come up with other purposes.)  Kids used to play down here and draw pictures on the walls.   Artists made charcoal drawings on the damp limestone, delicate masterpieces that will last for centuries as long as no one leans against them. 

A hundred -year-old charcoal drawing of the miners paying homage to the Virgin Mary.  The drawing references a statue that stands in the church of the Virgin in Maastrict. 

On Sunday, we had a date with another of Beppe's relatives.  We arranged to go down to Giessenburg and visit Gerben and Sietske Wijnja, Beppe's oldest brother and his wife.  We were invited to show up anytime after 11:00, so we set out at 10:30 and expected to arrive right after church.  What we didn't count on was the possibility of road construction.  Actually, what we didn't expect is that they would completely shut down a major highway on a weekend.  Three times, we were blocked at a freeway entrance and ended up wandering around the country waiting for TomTom to pick up  a new route to the next freeway entrance.  Then we just figured that we were going to have to find a new route altogether. 

That hour would have been a complete waste if we hadn't been driving through the Dutch countryside, where all the buildings sport sloping, barnstyle roofs over homey brick walls and cobbled sidewalks, where the grass is perpetually green and the cows are perpetually clean, where roads barely wide enough for a car and a bicycle are flanked on both sides with perfectly spaced trees and flooded with scores of cyclists in matching jerseys, forcing us to go slow enough to see the flowers in the windows and realize that, yes, those are yearling swans swimming in those canals.  The sad thing is I don't have any pictures to share with you because I was too busy gaping out the window and drinking it all in (and negotiating with the TomTom) to remember that I had a camera in my lap.  The pictures you see are from our Saturday trip. 

Looking afar from the top of Ft. St. Pietersberg.

 



Seth, Arian, Boogaloo, myself, Geertje, Sietske, and Gerben. 

We did eventually make it to Giessenburg, where we met most of the cousins and grandkids on their way out the door.  I guess we just took too long.  We spent a long and lovely afternoon, drinking coffee and looking at family photos, sharing jokes and hearing history from Gerben and Sietske, who are both in their eighties.  They asked us to stay for lunch.  We had wonderful Dutch soup (tomato with sausage and noodle -- who'd have thought of that combination in America?  I have never seen it before) and fluffy Dutch pastry and were showered with little Dutch coffee delicacies by Sietzke and her daughter Geertje. 



Boogaloo discovers Gerben and Seitske's motorized elevator
chair.  It was as good as a theme park to her. 

Gerben and Sietske's house was once the town school.  Seitske cleaned it. 
Then, when the school had outgrown the school, and the Wijnjas had
outgrown their apartment (9 kids will do that to you), the school board offered
them this house in exchange for their continued services.   

As we were leaving, Geertje suggested that we detour through Kinderdijk (which has nothing to do with children) and see the antique windmills which are still used to pump water and house people.  Note: if you visit the kinderdijk, you are expected to park in the pay parking and walk to the windmills.  The residents don't appreciate having their parking pilfered.  We didn't realize that we were pilfering parking until the museum director corrected us. 

The windmills of Kinderdijk, which are still in operation. 

On the way to Kinderdijk, we saw a sign for Dordrecht, and being Dordt grads, we just had to go there.  (Dordrecht is the city where the Dutch Reformed churches defined the doctrines that the national church would follow, back when there were national churches.)  We set up the TomTom to go to the historic city center and once again ran into road construction.  In addition, we also found narrow roads, rain clouds, and no parking, so we didn't actually get any pictures of historic downtown Dordrecht, but I did get a nice picture of the train station, just to prove that we were there. 

On the way home, we ran into yet more road construction (Seth is prepared to swear that the Dutch as a populace hate cars.), and had to make a detour through Tilburg and come into Eindhoven from the other side.  We made it home in time to have more soup before turning on the first football game of the day.  Because Sunday, where you are, is just starting.