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Published: July 18th 2019
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Our hosts gave us coupons for the Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) to get deals to travel by train. After having downloaded their app, we bought tickets to go to Nijmegen to watch some of the events going on in that city with the Vier-Daagse, which is the largest walking event in the world held here every year. The March of the World has some 48,000 participants walking 30, 40 or 50 kilometres per day for four straight days. While mostly for private entries, each NATO country sends army representatives to walk in full uniform and full pack. People dress up, sing and dance as they complete their daily walk and cross the finish line. The sidelines are packed with family, tourists like us and many other well-wishers, who also dance and applaud as they sip on ice-cold Grolsch, liberally consumed on patios, sidewalks and everywhere else. We did not see any drunks though! These folks have to get up early again to repeat the same distance following a different route when the event finishes Friday in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators. Yesterday’s estimate was 1.2 Million!
The Waalkade is the waterfront on the Waal River in the city. The
Canadian walker.
We also saw about a half dozen Nova Scotia flags and one from New Brunswick. Waal is actually the Rhine River before it enters The Netherlands. This area is a bit funky and lots of fun. Many bars and restaurants and one area is taken up by small food stands located in decorated campers and trailers. Many different foods from different nationalities. Many different beers. And lovely croquettes, that Dutch specialty of meat, flower and spices rolled into beaten egg and bread crumbs and then deep fried!
Back to the train app for a minute. A similar app exists for bus transportation. To find out how to travel on public transit, you simply put in your starting point and destination and it makes a travel plan for you. How far to walk and where to get to a bus, where to transfer and onto which route, which train station to go to and what platform, and which time to board, where to transfer and at what time and platform, all with detail about time. Time is accurate to the minute, but you have to keep your eyes open for changes. These can happen within minutes as we found out today. But very, very impressive, something Canada can learn from a lot!
The trains
are very quiet being operated on electricity, but also you can’t hear the thump-thump clacking of the rails like with our trains. We ended up sitting in the quiet section twice and other travellers will point very quickly to the “silence” sign, wanting that serene silence that comes with this ride.
We loved using the train. Too bad that the regular price was twice what we paid, which makes this type of travel quite expensive without a pass of some sort. People do use bicycles quite a lot, even for distances that might be considered too far to our liking. But their bike lanes are very effective and are always separated from car traffic.
The walk back from the train station to our place was about 30 minutes through the beautiful pedestrian-only downtown area. Combined with the rest of our walking today, we hit 18,000 steps on the FitBit. Won’t take much rockin’ tonight.
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