Benelux April 2013 -- Now we return to our original programming with Street Vehicles

Trout is always interested in the vehicles we see on these trips.  This is a composite of the ones that were not race cars.  We saw these on the street or while driving.

This motorcycle was waiting for us when we came out of the Franz Hals Museum in Haarlem.

 

This was someone's personal car at the race track in Zandvoort.

 

This was our rental piece of ecologically correct automotive frustration.  It is designed to die when you stop to save fuel.  It's a stick, so when you put the clutch in, it started up again.  That was a lot of fun for Trout in stop and go traffic.



 

I don't know what this car is, but it was worth a "quick, Lo, take some pictures" on the way from Bruges to Spa-Francorchamps.

 

We circled around twice to get pictures of this car on the way to Keukenhof.

 

 

This is some kind of special handicapped car that we saw in Bruges. 

 

This is upright in my saved pictures, but for the life of me, I could not get it to be right here.  Weird.  Oh well, don't hurt your neck looking at it.

 

 

Now these were a big surprise.  We saw them after the flower parade.  Fun. 

 

 

 

 

This was in the parking lot close to our B&B in Leiden.  I don't think it moved the whole time we were there.

 

Trout just had to take this picture because my scarf matched the car.

 

And I had to take these because the bike matched the car.

 

We called these vehicles "Pinocchios" in Italy.  They are very common all over Europe.  There's a little truck bed on the back.

 

Two cars in charging stations just down the street from our apartment in Amsterdam.

 

And another more attractive one across the street.

 

You can see Trout across the street on the corner supervising my picture-taking.

 

This looks at first like an ordinary sedan.  Why would Trout want a picture?  It's an OPEL!

 

 

There will be a few more cars in future postings, but these are the "special" ones.

Drive!, She Said, Part 1: Autoroute, Cities & Traffic -- June, 2012

Although we did our best to stay on smaller roads, we did need to use the autoroutes sometimes.  They were not all that different from the ones here except, and that's a BIG EXCEPT, they are in much better condition. 

You see the same kinds of vehicles and you definitely get to your destination much faster using them, but they don't go everywhere.  Driving in France was enjoyable except when we got stuck in some traffic jams.  I had read that it was impossible to navigate Aix-en-Provence, but that was a  piece of cake compared to trying to get through Arles.  It was so exasperating that I didn't even take any pictures.

If you click on the link above, you will get more detail on the kinds of roads and road rules we faced.  I will call your attention to a couple of significant signs in the next post.

So here we are traveling along on the autoroute just south of Paris heading toward Giverny.

 

Things were going well until we started getting close to the city.

 

There was no way we were going to get a speeding ticket in this mess.  Note the motorcycle to the right.

 

Things loosen up a bit and he's much farther ahead.  This maneuver is perfectly legal in France and most of Europe.

 

But eventually, the line of motocyles gets slowed down, too.

This looks awful, but it was nothing compared to Arles and it went much faster.

 

I took this picture at our first stop for diesel, or gazoil or gazole as it is sometimes called.  Unfortunately, the numbers aren't very clear.  The price per liter was 1.41 euros.  At the time we were there that was about $1.83 per liter or roughly $6.96 per gallon.  We are such whiners in this country...

 

This was the road sign by the gas station where we stopped.  Please notice that there are no road numbers or letters here, just directions to towns.  We encountered very few stop lights.  Traffic was handled with traffic circles like this one.  Except for the dreaded Arles where there were both.

 

This is what the gas station looked like.  Trout went in on his own and got the key to the toilet.

This is driving on the main street into Le Mans, the city.  There was lots of construction and we loved these signs indicating crosswalks.

 

But sometimes they got lost in all the other signage.  Here you can see a Pietons arrow as well.

 

 

Here is Trout pumping diesel again.  This was on our way south.

 

More construction, of course.

 

We're both a little wacky, but whether we're here or overseas, we like seeing what the truckers are hauling.

And the milirary convoys.

 

I chose these pictures for an end to this post.  This is from our room at the CDG Hilton.  We didn't have our car then.  We took the train and a hotel shuttle from the airport to the hotel.  The shuttle took us back the next day for our flight.  We loved this growing roof over the bus station.

 

And the next day we were in a totally different kind of traffic.