A distinctive sound.

Lying in bed last night, still able to keep our eyes open and read a bit, when we heard what sounded like a shriek and then the most definite sound of two bikes colliding.
Happened at the corner up the street, which we can see from the bedroom.
Had to be a little surreptitious, since we didn't want to seem too much like Gladys Kravitz while peering out from between the curtains.
Quite dark in spite of the street lights, but we could make out at least one bike lying on it's side and three or four riders conferring over possible damages, human or otherwise.
Didn't hear the "wee-wah" of an oncoming ambulance, so my guess is there were no injuries and within a few minutes, everyone continued on their way.
Not sure what would have been the cause with the exception of an obvious failure to yield. I've noticed at that corner in particular the bike riders do tend to cut it close from time to time, so I'm sure that was just one of those times when what could have been a near miss turned into a crash.
We'll be picking up our second set of visitors today, who were originally going to come to Hengelo by train from the airport, but their arrival is at a time when we hope the traffic will be favourable for a pick-up.
I'm sure if they want to do any biking we'll need to go over the road rules in detail, especially in light of last night's little reminder.
There will be three bodies, so hopefully they can suffer being squished in the back of the A6.
Remember that I was grousing about how big it is?
Forget that.

A couple videos

I had taken four short videos on Friday as well, but didn't want to put them in with the previous post.






For this next one, you might want to turn down your volume, since it was rather windy and the mike in the camera picked up every little nuance.





and here are the windmills in North Holland.




Yup...exciting stuff.

The long Friday

Rather than do the sensible thing and wait until the appropriate time to head for the airport, I decided to make a little road trip out of the whole thing and take a drive over the Afsluitdijk.
Besides, I'm really not that keen to drive after dark any more all by my lonesome, so I wanted to actually be at the airport before dark.
Sucks to come to the realisation that as time marches on, my visual acuity has somewhat diminished.
Managed to hit the road around noon time, after tending to some minor Friday chores, and one of the first places that caught my interest was a little town called Sneek, in the province of Friesland. Sneek is definitely a place to visit in warmer weather, since the whole place is a maze of canals that thread through the town. Had to figure out a way of getting this pic, since parking a big-assed car like the A6 can be a challenge.
I've since discovered that there are plenty pictures of this place on the Internet.

So much for inventing that wheel.

Mine has a cool looking boat, so there.

The weather had started to take a bit of a turn for the worse by the time I got to the dike, so the visibility was pretty wretched, along with the wind chill. The temperature was something like 1.5°C, but it felt much colder when I stopped for a couple photo ops.

This one doesn't really do it justice, but I tried.



Those vehicles are on the four lane highway that goes along the length of the dyke, with the burm running along to the left keeping out the North Sea.
They had a neat little illustration:

Of course, there's always the environmental angle, and I'm not quite sure what they were demonstrating with this huge billboard, since it was too bloody cold to stand there and take it all in.

One of the notable things about being that far north and in perfectly flat country
(note previous comment about wind chill) is that there's not much to stop the wind from blowing, and windmills are everywhere.
This was on the North Holland side:

There was another one just behind me when I took this, and they have a sort of eerie swooshing sound they give off. Not sure I'd want to live too close to one.
It did remind me at times of driving in the prairies with some minor exceptions. The trees, the water everywhere and oh...there are considerably more people per square kilometer. Other than those minor considerations, exactly the same.

Really.

I did manage to get to Alkmaar, but by then it was coming up on 4:00 p.m. and the dreaded rush hour was beginning to set in. Decided to plug the airport in to the gps and have it take me away, even though Gabe's flight wasn't coming in until almost 9:00 p.m.
To give you an idea of the size of Schipol, I crossed the path of the farthest runway and still had something like six kilometers to go to get to the terminal. Gabe said that was the runway they came in on, and it took them another 15 minutes to taxi to the gate.
By the time we left again the traffic was quite manageable and we were at our door at 10:35 p.m., a full hour and a half earlier than if she had taken the train.