newelty

When I used to travel for a living, updating travel guidebooks, I would often think to myself: Why isn’t this making me happier? After all, for lots of people who don’t know better, being a travel writer is a dream job…in theory.

I realized that when you’re being paid to do something, it’s work. Period. It might not be anything as difficult as working in a coal mine, but it still is work. When I was in the Netherlands, rocketing from place to place, I would sit on the train, noticing the neat bicycle lanes that ran out across the flat fields into infinity. Where were people biking to on those paths?

I finally got to find out. The red bike below is mine. This photo is from the top of a dike, with the sea at my back:

It’s incredibly satisfying to finally know where people are heading on those mysterious bike paths, heading out seemingly to infinity, because of the flat Dutch sky.

In this case, they’re biking out of the city centers, into the wide-open spaces of the Dutch countryside. This scene below is about five miles from central Amsterdam:

The town is named Durgerdam, and as you can see from this very brief wikipedia entry, it’s not a destination. But a lovely harbor town is a special thing wherever you are–and even more so incredibly when it’s just in the backyard of Amsterdam’s Red Light District.

These houses, with their nautical touches, embody so much of what I love about Dutch design:

Look for more on the off-the-beaten-track Netherlands soon, as well as an entry on why the heck everything is in orange in that country.

And in case you’d like to see where this other Amsterdam lies, point A below is the approximate location of the first photo above: