You may have gathered from my post earlier this week that we disappeared off to Holland last weekend to see our friends Adam & Sandra, celebrate their son Thomas’s second birthday and deliberately surprise Thomas’s grandparents, Tim & Anna, who were also visiting.
The outgoing leg was really straightforward, with great roads right up til about half a mile from their place. The we spent a frustrating half hour following Tom-Tom as it tried in vain to get us to the new-build on roads that have either been abandoned in a large area of development, or have yet to be built!
Utrecht is a really pretty place, with a deep set canal winding through the town with its cobbled streets and wonky houses. The weather was gloriously bright & sunny and perilously cold, but it was a great introduction to what is probably well off the tourist trail for most people from the UK.
Adam & Sandra were generous hosts, putting us in mind of our friends Scott & Carolyn in Seattle. In fact both Adam & Scott LOVE their coffee, but while Scott has a really smart stainless steel cafetiere, Adam has an espresso machine that grinds beans at from the top to make totally amazing and pretty much instantanteous coffee.
Their house backs on to a canal that was frozen the whole weekend, to such an extent that Adam had been walking on it the previous week. THAT’s cold!
Most of our return trip was straightforward and we pottered back to the tunnel via some very quiet seaside villages along the French coast – one can imagine that in the summer, the glorious sandy beaches will be heaving with holiday-makers. As soon as we unloaded in the UK we realised that the weather had changed, hence the previous pictures and the additional two and a half hours it took us to get home.
But Utrecht is well work a visit!