From: Rainer Subject: Rainer's Europe Tour 1998 -- part 8 Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1998 16:48:12 EDT Dear Family and Friends, We've completed September and are already into October. Time is flying by. Before we'll know it this trip will be over. Here's the latest installment from my journal. Cheers, Rainer Thursday, 10/1 We started the morning with a breakfast at the Big Bell -- Dutch pancakes. There's a discrepancy between what we know as raisins in English and what the Dutch call raisins. They really mean grapes. So the Dutch pancakes with apples and raisins were a surprise. They were good, in any case. Today we had planned to find Vera's mother's grave. We picked up her Aunt and she showed us the way to the cemetery. After double checking with the grounds keeper on the exact location of the grave number, we walked under the chestnut trees of the Oak and Dunes cemetery to find grave 2857. The inscription of the grave stone was readable even though part of the stone was covered with sand, moss, and leaves. I used the trusty Oregon windshield scraper (my Costco card) to remove the moss and sand from the stone. Monika brought over a watering can and we rinsed the sand from the incised lettering. Vera left a nice bouquet of flowers on the stone, we took some pictures, and left. It was a somber time, but of keen interest to Vera who'd never seen the spot before. He mother died in 1952 and with this visit, some sort of closure was reached. We dropped Aunt Katy off at her apartment, said our final good byes, and headed for Scheveningen Harbor. Not much going on there. I'm not sure that we found the touristy part of the harbor. We walked around a while, my foot with the double blister hurting a bit more than I would have wanted it to. We didn't find any shops of herring booths, so we headed back to the hotel after deciding where we would have lunch later. Monika fell asleep almost instantly. Vera rummaged around in the room preparing for the package of accumulated new stuff and broken stuff we were planning to mail back to Portland. We woke a sleepy Monika after and hour and headed for Veronica's on the beach. There's a whole series of restaurants that build semi-permanent sites on the sand next to the promenade. They take down after the first week of October. Several of the restaurants had already been disassembled. Veronica, featuring an Italian ice cream menu, was only going to exist for another couple of days. Our order of patats frites, ham sandwich, Heineken, sprite and coffee came up quickly since we were the only customers. The ice cream/fruit sundae was a nice finish. Next we drove down town to The Hague, to the central train station close to where we arrived on Monday. We were going to finalize our reservation for Saturday's trip to Berlin. Plans change. Turns out that the Dutch railway system is undergoing some major constructional changes. They do this on the weekends. The only way to get to Berlin on Saturday would be to take 4 different trains to the Dutch border, and then catch the main train to Berlin. 2 of the 4 connections involved transfer times of only 3 minutes. The alternative was to go to Amsterdam, then take a bus to the border (for which there was no schedule at the station) and then catch the train to Berlin. Or, if we left on a weekday, we would only have to make a single transfer that had a 25 minute window. Vera wanted to take the Friday train. But what about the birding in the dunes? And what about mailing the package? Time out. I had a brief recollection of the scene at SFO airport with Air France. I also remembered the quick decision to have the laundry done rather than to do it ourselves, leaving Monika without long pants for the day. This wasn't the way it was supposed to be. We gave up our position at the international counter (you pick numbers and sit in a waiting area for your number to be called) and decided to think and talk things over before making a split second decision. Vera already had taken the next number ticket from the machine. Three more number tickets would be taken and called and ignored while we figured out what the best thing to do was. My original plan was to have this be a flexible trip -- stress free if possible -- and not tied to a schedule. We liked our hotel. We liked the places to eat. Why give up stuff we still wanted to do for a silly train schedule? We agreed to stay until Monday, and just relax. We'll need to notify my cousin in Berlin that we arrive two days later. We'll need to check with the hotel and the car rental place. But, the pace immediately slowed down. It felt good not to have the pressure anymore to hurry up and get things done by tomorrow morning. Perhaps we'll rent some bikes and ride the paths through the dunes. We still are going to see Madurodam and do some more serious bird watching (rather than catch an occasional species in the city parks). Okay, that was done. It was also a lot cheaper, 6 guilders each, to ride to Berlin than the 130 Francs to ride from Paris. Turns out the Thalys train from Paris is the reason for the cost difference. It must also go faster. We'll see. We floundered around downtown trying to find the "traditional shopping" district. We did find a shopping area of sorts, but it's more like a Washington square on old narrow streets -- not the kind of stuff tourists want to look at. We ended up at the Binnenhof, a large government complex with a very big pond. We watched a woman stop her bike and pull out her uneaten sandwich from lunch and start to feed the birds. The pigeons and gulls got the bread. When a Grey Heron flew over, she fed him the meat. Out on the pond Monika spotted a large grebe. We had a hard time deciding which of the two large grebes it was. Then, after all three of us taking looks at it through the binos, we agreed that it was the Great Crested Grebe, a new one for all of us. Back to the hotel to dump our stuff, finish the partial bottle of wine from yesterday, and headed for a quick dinner at New York Pizza again. After dinner we strolled down the promenade and walked out the famous pier at Scheveningen. We climbed the tower at the end of the pier and I tried my luck at taking a panorama shot of the hotels and restaurants on the strand. Tomorrow awaits. We'll need to find out what happens with the street parking, take care of the changed travel plans, and hope for no rain for the birding trip.