Heading East
Yesterday morning I picked up the rental car. I managed to weasel my way around the big fee that car hire companies normally charge for cross-border one-way rentals by finding a company that had a car with German number plates that they needed to get rid of. I had to pick it up early, though, since I'd arranged to meet my cousin, Ÿ, at the University of Twente by 11:30am. That by itself was doable, but I also had to pick up Mum from Zandvoort, get my baggage and say goodbye to sarahh at her place, and drive to the other side of the country. So my last look at Amsterdam proper was while waiting for the tram to the rental car place, as the sun rose.
Everything went more or less as planned. I already knew we'd be pretty much on time when we left Amsterdam, because there was a sign showing the distance to Hengelo (the university town), and it wasn't that great. It also showed the distances to Berlin and København, many hundreds of kilometres away.
Ÿ picked a nice restaurant and we caught up on family news. He was the cousin who really helped me out last year, e.g. I sent all my stuff to his address, and on my behalf he told customs officials to get stuffed when they tried to collect duty. Mum and I spent the rest of the day in Enschede, the city that she grew up in.
She showed me the house where she lived with her parents, four brothers and four sisters. Believe it or not, she was raised in a Catholic family. She told me a lot of stuff about her side of the family that I didn't know, like why my uncle in New Zealand is the black sheep of the family, and why we never hear very much from one of my other uncles in Twente. And oh, how the family travelled! Between her and her siblings they'd lived on six continents at one time or another, and some of them never returned. Both of my parents, of course, are in that camp, which is why I find my dad's disapproval of me leaving Australia rather hypocritical. I also found out who the woman that her father lived with was-it wasn't his wife, who died soon after I was born. She was actually the female half of a couple that he and his wife had known for a long time; the woman's husband died at around the same time as my maternal grandmother. The one remaining church-going member of Mum's family was apparently pissed off that he moved in with her so quickly afterwards. I like to think that the four of them were more than just friends, but I suppose I'll never know how realistic that is.
Apart from the family history lesson, Mum and I just wandered around, looking at much the same stuff that hopeforyou and I looked at when we wandered around last year. We also stopped at the blacksmith that once belonged to my paternal grandfather, in the nearby township of Lonneker. When Hope and I went, the current owner and his family knew exactly who I was and he invited her and me to join him and his family for a few beers. This time, however, they were apparently holidaying in Poland. Everyone seems to be visiting Poland this year-it must be all the rage.
The only other stop was a luggage shop where Mum worked half a century ago. This was after she returned from living in Belgium and France, where she made a living as a nanny. The things she had to say about nannying sounded similar to what lunatravels told me from her experience, so I suppose not a lot has changed over the decades. When she was working that job, she was planning to go to South Africa, but when she met Dad who was bound for Australia, she went off with him instead.
Anyhow, we crossed the border into Germany that evening, so I said my last goodbyes to the Netherlands for a while. I found that I hate leaving places that are important to me by road if it will be for a long time-I felt the same way last year, when I left California for six months by driving to Arizona. We're staying in a hotel in a tiny town not far from where the 30 and 31 autobahns meet. The bar is deathly quiet, but the staff are nice, even though Mum speaks to them in English up front, when I know she speaks some German. That bothers me a bit, but other than that, travelling with Mum seems to be a fairly pleasant experience.