Arnhem, The Netherlands

Arnhem was another city we visited based on word-of-mouth from people we'd met along the way, and, like Antwerp, it proved to be a very pleasant and enjoyable place. We arrived in the early evening and took a stroll around the city, stopping for dinner at a pleasant café. During our stroll we noticed that many of the businesses in Arnhem close up as early as seven p.m., but that didn't bother us as we were in need of an early night.

The next morning we visited the Hoge Veluwe National Park, the place that had so piqued our interest that we decided to come to Arnhem. The park is the largest national park in the Netherlands, and like the rest of the country, it is almost entirely flat. This lack of topographical impediments makes the hundreds of free-access bicycles in the park even more attractive.

Admission to the park includes use of a bike; just pick one out of the many racks around the park and leave it in a rack when you're done with it. Very civilized. The bikes are simple affairs with coaster brakes and one gear, but that's fine in a place like this. We cruised around the northern end of the park, surprised to find a landscape that looked downright coastal: sand dunes anchored by grasses, scattered pines establishing themselves here and there. Later on, in the visitor's center, we learned that this landscape is partially the result of soil depletion from generations of farming and grazing. Eventually it became a unique ecosystem deserving of protection in its own right, so now this former wasteland is a national park.

The park also contains the Kröller-Müller Museum, home to a large collection of Van Goghs as well as more modern painting and sculpture, and the Museonder, a science museum devoted to the underground world. The Museonder is itself underground, and in its central gallery hang the roots of an enormous beech tree on the surface. Another prominent feature of the park is the St. Hubertus hunting lodge, itself a museum of art deco architecture.

Our bus from the park brought us back to downtown Arnhem, where we first went for another walk to admire the city's architecture. After that, we found Arnhem's nightlife, a zone of restaurants and bars arrayed around a church square. After dinner and ice cream, we visited a few pubs before calling it a night. The next day we were off to Rotterdam.