Wandering Around Den Haag
You may not have noticed, but I don’t like places being given two names. That is why this post is called Den Haag and not The Hague.
These are some pictures that I took over the weekend.
Wandering Around Amsterdam
I took these pictures in Amsterdam over the last few days.
It was cold, but at least it was sunny!
Fast Train to Rotterdam and Den Haag
It has just been announced that Thalys is now running fast through to Amsterdam. So I looked up and see if I could book from Ebbsfleet to Rotterdam for a reasonable price at a reasonable speed. I actually would go to Den Haag, but couldn’t find that on the Eurostar web site. Or should I say, I could find it, but I couldn’t book it!
In mid-January, I have found that I could do the trip in three hours and forty-seven minutes for a return cost of £127.50 with a credit charge of £3.
So how does that compare to easyJet?
easyJet on the same days costs £47.98 with a charge of £8 for the credit card.
The parking at Ebbsfleet and Stansted are about the same and I suspect you can get them for about £70, with perhaps an extra tenner for diesel for Ebbsfleet. And then you have the trains at the other end, which would both be just a few Euros.
As to time, the flight takes about five hours door-to-door and the train takes about six and a half.
So is it a no-brainer to take the plane?
No! I hate airports and all of the ridiculous rules. Not all are security too!
So it is perhaps why I actually prefer to take the boat. The last trip, I used Stena from Harwich and because I had a problem with the Lotus, I came back the same way. It is not really such a long trip in terms of time, as I would do Harwich-Hook overnight. But then coming back, you have the annoying delay, whilst they keep you on board, so you might have breakfast. I don’t, as their offerings are not gluten-free!
I normally go over using Norfolk Line from Dover to Dunkirk, which usually takes about eight hours door-to-door. That may be a lot slower, but I can fill the car with all the goodies that expats can’t get in Holland. And I can also take my Brompton!
Cost of the ferry is usually about £60 with perhaps about the same amount for diesel. I know that calculating the cost of motoring on the fuel cost is not valid, but it is the way we always add it up!
So perhaps, the easiest and most relaxing way is to drive via Dover. At least you get a nice break on the boat and can listen to BBC Radio 5 Live all of the way. And it’s only three hours slower than the plane.
Limping There and Back
As I drove to get the boat at Harwich, the Lotus Elan developed a gearbox fault. What it meant was that I only had second, fourth and reverse gears.
I was faced with a dilemma, in that did I drive back home and get the Jaguar or did I continue. To complicate matters, I was also going to see Ipswich play Peterborough, so I’d miss the match, if I changed cars.
So I continued.
It now should be said, that the engine of the Lotus can drive the car happily in second and fourth, so without any mishaps, I managed to drive from Ipswich to Harwich carefully at about fifty-five. I had dreaded getting on the boat, as on some ferries, you have to drive up a steep ramp, but in this case it was almost level, as they weren’t using the upper decks at all. I only had a few kilometres to go on the other side, so it was a chance worth taking.
I did check in with a friendly forum called Lotus Elan Central and this identified the problem as a gear cable. So I didn’t need to get any serious help in Holland and just drove back to the boat last night.
It was then a quiet drive home through the villages on a getting-better-sort of Sunday. Weather wise that is.
The question that has to be asked is, how many performance cars could have limped home so successfully? As a point here, my 2.2 litre diesel Jaguar always needs to start in first, as it has nowhere near the power range of the Lotus.
Two Elans in the Dark
My yellow Lotus has found a friend; a red one in Holland.
What do Lotus Elans do when they meet each other?
Seriously though, the red one is a left-hand-drive example from the second series, so it’s about three years younger than mine. Note the different wheels! The newer car also has sixteen inch wheels, as opposed to my fifteen.
Hare on the Dock at the Hook of Holland
No! I hadn’t been drinking, but I do know a hare when I see one.
As I got off the boat this morning on a wet day at the Hook of Holland, I could not believe my eyes. There wandering up the dock, whilst I waited for passport control, was a rather large brown hare.
Comments to easyJet
I was asked to comment on my latest flight by easyJet. Here’s my main comment.
I took the one flight home from Amsterdam and although you’ve called it outbound it was inbound for me, as I live half-an-hour north of Stansted.
I try to avoid Schipol, despite visiting Den Haag fairly often.
Lately though, I have been driving using Norfolk Line, as I usually go for four to five days and bring all sorts of goodies that Holland doesn’t have. I’m also a coeliac and stock up with things like Dr. Schar’s bread-mix which are unavailable in the UK. This is much easier in a car.
But it is Schipol that really annoys me. The easyJet gate at Schipol is a long walk and is distinctly unfriendly with no seats. I also always take a laptop and find the security annoying.
So there is nothing wrong with easyJet, it is just Schipol, which compared to Stansted is distinctly passenger unfriendly. Especially for people like me, who never buy anything in the shops.
I should also add, that your new big box crisps looked nice, but nowhere in the guide did it say whether they were gluten free or not. If you said what was, you might sell more. As it is I only just buy a coffee and no food.
Looking at my travel folder, I notice that I haven’t used easyJet from Schipol since April the eleventh. I think in that time, I’ve perhaps driven about four times, so the flight experience must be bad. But I have flown easyJet elsewhere for a holiday.
Scheveningen
I took these pictures just as the sun went down at Scheveningen in Holland.
The interesting pictures are those of the LED streetlight. So why is this light so good?
- The light appears to have fifteen sets of three rows of four 1-watt LEDs. They look like they are the same LEDs as in my floodlights here.
- These lights have a total power consumption of perhaps 200 watts, but then nearly all of this energy ends up as light. A typical halogen light would use between five and ten times more energy.
- You can also see that each of the individual banks of four lights are angled to give an even light on the ground. This is exactly the same way that the lights in floodlight towers at a football ground are arranged so that the pitch is evenly lit.
- LEDs have a life of many years, so how much will be saved on maintenance. I suspect that these lights might even just need a wash every year or so.
- One subsidiary benefit of these lights is that the light goes where it is needed and not up in the sky. Astronomers will be very pleased.
But these lights are just the start. As LEDs are dimmable, low-voltage, easily controlled and have a low energy consumption all sorts of tricks can be played to make them even better. In a country with enough sun, you could even have the lights solar-powered. But perhaps in Holland or the UK, by using a light profile, which dimmed them in the middle of a night, it might even be possible.
It may be quite a mundane piece of street furniture, but in a few years time, all street-lighting will be based on these principles.
If it isn’t, it’ll be a disgrace.
Feelings at a Wedding
This was the first wedding I’d been to since my wife died. Or perhaps should I say that it was the first wedding between young people, as I’d been to another involving one of my ex-business partners, who like me had been widowed. That was different, as it showed me a lot of hope for the future. It was also a nice touch, that the groom was having the same best man fifty years later.
But this one was a full wedding, with both a civil and a church ceremony. They do it that way in Holland.
As to the wedding itself, everything went well and except for a few small glitches, it seemed to go smoothly. But then what wedding goes absolutely perfectly. If they did Robert Altman’s film wouldn’t be so funny!
But it was the details that brought me to tears. Just words, but many times in the past at a wedding, my wife and I would smile at each other and repeat our vows and perhaps sometimes joke at some inappropriateness or funny memory. Not that I can seem to remember much of our marriage at all. Perhaps having only a couple of photos or videos doesn’t help. I’ve still got her wedding dress though and perhaps one day, it’ll fit a granddaughter.
Those memories made me sad and I was pleased that I’d hidden away at the back of the church.
A Curious and Tragic Fact About Women Cyclists
I just spotted this on the BBC’s web site.
Men do about three times more journeys by bicycle than women, but in accidents causing deaths with lorries in London last year, seven out of the eight victims were women.
I’m writing this in Holland, where I suspect that the ratio of women cyclists to men is not as low as in the UK. I wonder if the Dutch have the same anomaly with their accidents? The figures in Holland would probably shed some light on those for the UK.
I do wonder though, whether a lot of the difference is due to the fact that the average man rides a bicycle much more aggressively than does the average woman. I’m also constantly looking out for traffic on the lanes where I ride around Suffolk and make sure that when I meet a lorry, I either get them to slow down or I time it to meet them in a safe and obvious place. I’m also pretty fit, so I can get out of the saddle to sprint to get out of the way.
But this is only conjecture.
None of the researchers in the article seem to have a clue. And it’s not for want of trying.
The Anonymous Widower 