The good....we are to the point that we can get
some places without Miss GPS. It's nice to be able to drive without being
on high alert every minute!
We
have figured out the detour system when there is road construction. Miss GPS doesn’t know when a road is
temporarily closed due to construction and just keeps “re-calculating route”
right back to the closed road! They have
an alphabet system of detour signs. So
if you come to some road construction, look for the letter and follow those
signs….for instance this “B”. There
might be other letters but you ignore them and follow your letter bread crumb
trail!
We have grown used to having a traffic
light for every lane. If the
intersection is traffic light controlled, each and every lane has it’s own
light, including the bus lane, the pedestrian lane and the bike lane. It is easy to miss your light as you approach and see this wide array of lights! This picture is too small for you to see
the bike and pedestrian lights on the right.
We are getting better at zeroing in on our lane!
The good and the bad….
If you
are a bicyclist, the little bike traffic lights are wonderful! Green bike you go, red bike you stop. Also if
you are a car…you know who has the right of way. In all
instances the bike has the right of way if there is an incident…green light or
no.
The bad is on
a dark, rainy night the bicyclists are still out and it is so very hard to see them! We
are both on high alert on those nights!
This is one of the intersections in
downtown Zeist. The motorbike on the
right has a blue license plate so can drive on the bike path, not the
road. Watch out for them buzzing past
you! We are always watching for bikes,
buses, other cars, people and motorized wheelchairs as we drive around
town. For that reason, if we leave Zeist
we drive, if we do errands around Zeist we bike. Much
easier; less stressful, takes about the same amount of time, no cost and hassle
finding a parking place and great exercise!
The roads here are perfectly paved. We hadn’t seen a single crack or pothole in a
road until we got to a parking lot last week and the parking lot was full of
potholes. A first here for us. Most of the bike paths are equally smooth. There is only one place between here and our
nearest grocery store that if we’re not careful bumping over the crack in the
bike path we find an egg
This is the
first dirt road we’ve seen. We laughed
at the 60 km/hr speed limit! Around
towns the speed limit is always 30 km/hr, maybe 50 km/hr if you are on the
outskirts of town. Very slow…We didn’t
try 60 on this road : )
The terrifying; driving in the downtown of
any size town or city is terrifying! (youtube "biking in Utrecht centrum!)The
roads are narrow, the bike paths are the same size, signs are confusing and
there is so many cars, bikes and people it’s crazy! We go to great lengths to avoid driving in
the city centrums! In Utrecht we either
park outside the city centrum and walk 15-20 min. in or we ride the bus from
just outside our front door.
We were
checking missionary apartments last month.
One of our assigned apartments is above the McDonalds (yea for me!!)
right on the city centrum plaza in Almere.
We had googled it, put Miss GPS on it, talked to others who had been
there and headed into town. We ended up
in an alley by a market. That wasn’t
right. We headed back down the alley and
saw a little underground pass. Someone
had told us we needed to go through an underpass. (all this time Miss GPS was repeating over
and over “you have reached your destination”, which we clearly hadn’t!). Remember we are in the city centrum, there
are people, bikes, buses, and cars everywhere. So we headed into the
underpass. I could see a parking garage
but no entrance. Just into the underpass (by now we are both pretty stressed
out) I said with amazement “Wow, here we are in the city centrum and there’s NO
traffic”! 10 seconds later Joe says with
just a bit of panic “we’re in the bus lane”!
Indeed, I had driven down under the city centrum bus terminal into the
bus garage area! Bus lanes here are
sacred and no one ever drives in
them! We
drove for 3 blocks like scared rabbits until we came out on the other
side of the centrum. We turned on the
first side street we could find and parked.
We called the missionaries, told them we would be late and googled
mapped it from our car to their apartment.
We happily walked the 20 minutes to the apartment! We have now been there 4 times and finally
found the close, cheap parking lot near the apartment.
We go some places with ease, we have had only 1 speeding ticket and 2 parking tickets (a good mission record apparently!), and know where to avoid if at all possible! Not bad for oldies in a new place!
