Park Hogue de Veluwe

Yesterday (Saturday), we decided to travel for the day to one of the national parks in the Netherlands. It was pouring rain all through the night, and the rain was still falling, though a bit slower, when we awoke early Saturday morning. We felt pretty adventurous taking a trip to a national park to be outside most of the day in the rain, but then, we're in Holland and you can't put your life on hold because of rain since there's a good chance of rain every day of the year!

Park Hogue de Veluwe is a park situated in Eastern Netherlands between Apeldoorn, Ede, and Arnhem (for those of you who want to look this up on your map since I'm pretty sure most of you don't have a clue where these places are!) Actually, we don't have much of a clue either since we can't find a map of the whole country anywhere. We look up driving directions on the internet and have a book that shows different cities and towns in the Netherlands, but nothing that has the entire country on it. The drive was relatively smooth until we got off the highway. The only directions the park web site gave was to follow the signs off the highway. Well, that worked for a few miles. Then construction blocked the entire road. Hmm. We made a U-turn drove back down the road almost to the highway and made another U-turn. (John is very accomplished at U-turns since coming to the Netherlands!) We noticed a sign in Dutch that apparently meant to take a detour. The only reason we figured this out this time was that we knew the road was completely blocked a few miles down the road. So, we took the detour. We both swore we were going in a circle, but it was hard to tell as we were on tiny roads surrounded by 8-foot tall corn stalks, sheep and cows the entire time. It felt like we were driving through someone's farm. We finally emerged back onto a more well-traveled road and spotted signs once more pointing to the entrance to the park. Yea! We made it to an entrance! Though, oddly enough, it was an entrance on the complete opposite side of the park than where we had intended to enter. Oh well. We paid our money (to get in the gate, to park the car, to see the art museum, to get a tour of a hunting lodge...) and found the main visitor center.

By this time, it had stopped raining for the most part, though it was still quite cool outside. We ended up looking around the visitor center museum, an interesting conglomeration of scientific facts, dry humor, disgusting partially decomposed animal carcasses, and interactive dioramas with recordings of a nice woman telling us facts in Dutch. The museum was basically focused on the composition of the earth under the park, animals found in the park now and long ago, and the amount of water that falls and is put to use in Park Hogue de Veluwe. By the time we finished wandering around, the sun had started to come out and we decided to try out the "white bicycles."

The park has hundreds of white bicycles parked in lots at various places around the property that can be used by any visitor. You just take a bike and then leave it at any bicycle parking facility when you are done using it. We decided biking was a great way to see a lot of ground in a little time. Saturday morning and early afternoon on a semi-cloudy, cool day is a great time to have the park to yourself! We loved riding through the forested areas and the grass plains. The weather was perfect. We didn't see any wild animals, but we thoroughly enjoyed the nature we did see. Beautiful!

Part of the park was previously owned by a very rich family, the Kröller-Müllers, at the turn of the century. The family had a hunting lodge built by a lake on the property by a famous architect, H.P. Berlage. Erin heard that a group from the American Women's Club was going to take a tour of this lodge in the future so she knew tours were offered of this lodge where the royal family still stays sometimes. Tickets for the tour were only €2 per person so we figured, "Why not?" After a few minutes into the tour we discovered why not. The tour was completely in Dutch. Erin figured they would at least have English printed guides or something. Nope. Erin decided to make the best of it; after all, she really just wanted to get to see the architecture, decorations, and furniture inside the lodge. John was bored out of his mind. As the group moved from one room to the next, John insisted on making funny remarks about what he imagined the tour guide had been saying about this room for the last 15 minutes! The tour was 45 minutes, and after about 30 minutes John began secretly wondering how he could just sneak out of the lodge and forego the rest of the tour.

Whew! We survived the tour of the St.Huberts Hunting Lodge. Now we can say we've been.

There is also an art museum in the park because Mrs. Kroller-Muller was an avid art collector. The museum has tons of art and a large collection of original Van Goghs besides a 25 hectare (don't ask me how many acres that is - I'm not so good with my metric conversions yet, should've listened better in 5th grade) sculpture garden. There are over 100 sculptures and we didn't get to see them all, but the grounds are great and the ones we did see ranged from a modern display of brightly painted barrels stacked up to floating white plastic shapes in a pond to bronze nudes sculpted in the 1800s.

It was a satisfying day and we were so tired when we got home.

We bought refrigerated lasagna from the store to have for dinner last night. Unfortunately it came in a plastic container. John decided to follow the oven bake directions, which said nothing about the fact that the lasagna was in a plastic container. After 10 minutes John pulled the lasagna back out to check the progress and found that, sure enough, the plastic container was starting to melt. Since we're low on kitchen paraphenalia we had only a pot to transfer the lasagna to, but it seemed to work.

Note: Do not put plastic containers in the oven even if the directions say you can. The cheese in lasagnas in the Netherlands is...different. We never figured out what it was. Not mozzarellaa or Parmesann. Nevertheless, we ate the whole thing. You can also get excellent chocolate bars with hazelnuts in the Netherlands. Yum!