Getting around; the good, the bad and the terrifying!

We have been driving 4 1/2 months now.  Although it's not anything like driving in Manila, Philippines, it is different and we are older!

 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

or two cracked when we get home! 

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!