Tag Archives: Limburg

Valkenburg

Leave a Reply

Previous – Zuid Limburg

So I woke up with a blister from all the hours of walking I’d done the previous day, but it wasn’t so bad yet (eventually it took over most of my left middle toe lol). We picked up things for breakfast and lunch at a convenience store, and ate breakfast on benches outside the train station. We missed the bus, but we were still a bit early, so we took the train instead. This was the first time in the Netherlands that I took a train that wasn’t NS – apparently in an attempt to cut costs, NS divested itself of a bunch of minor lines a while ago, so this one is run for instance by Arriva. You can still use the same transit card, but you have to boop the Arriva card machine instead of the NS card machine. And if you are arriving by NS and then taking an Arriva train (or vice versa, of course), you have to sign out of the NS machine and then back in to the Arriva machine to continue on your journey.

Which really wasn’t a big deal since at this point, we were only taking Arriva. Valkenburg is a nice little town, though to cross the main car street (Geneindestraat) that lies between the train station and the historic city took a LONG time even with the fancy timed crosswalks. The historic city is pretty nice, and the Klein Geul river runs through it, which eventually ends up in the Maas just north of Maastricht. Continue reading →

Zuid Limburg

Leave a Reply

Previous – Maastricht

Fully a third of all Tharash’s trip pictures were taken on this day, I think he might like this place. I also took a lot of pictures, so… this will probably have the most pictures of any post on this trip.

This day we went to the hostel’s dining room for breakfast; it’s a breakfast buffet that’s only an extra 10 euros, for which you can make as many broodjes as you like, or get boiled eggs, or yogurt, or cereal. Probably some other stuff too, I didn’t make a list. We’d also gotten the lunch package, where they give you a bag with some pre-prepared stuff and then you can make more broodjes from the breakfast material to put in it. The paper lunch bags were a bit big, so we transferred the materials to our backpacks – and the bottled water to our own waterbottles.

Then we headed out. Over a pedestrian bridge, past the Maastricht Museum, and to a bus stop under some trees. The bus went past the European Union monument; did you know the European Union agreement in 1993 was signed in Maastricht? They seem quite proud of it. Also the stars on the monument spin under certain conditions which is pretty funny and neat. The bus ride out to our destination was about half an hour, and then we had to walk another 15-20 minutes to get to the start of the walking tour we were going on. Continue reading →

Maastricht

Leave a Reply

Previous – the Drentsche Aa

Sorry for the delay; first I was tired and didn’t feel like blogging for a bit, and then I was in the process (still am in the process really) of switching over to Linux because I’d like an operating system that doesn’t have a stupid nosy spying algorithm in it, THANKS Microsoft. As a Windows-girlie for the past 29 years, being on Kubuntu now has been a learning curve. Like I had to format my HDD so I could play my Steam games, and it took me 3 days to figure that out. And, relevant to this blogging endeavour, I had to find a new photo editing program. There are a bunch of things Linux does well, like it starts up super fast because it doesn’t have all of Windows’ deadweight bloat programs, but apparently straightening photos is not something people commonly use; I went through a dozen programs over two hours to find what I was looking for (apparently most people only want to rotate their photos 90 degrees? What, they’ve never taken a crooked picture before?? Or else it’s some pro-level program that’s much too time-consuming to use). Windows’ photo editor previously handled it very smoothly, so I could easily straighten every photo, and I was looking for something like that. The program on Linux that does the same thing in the same way is called Shotwell (and then I still need to use Gwenview to resize them, so it’s the same steps as on Windows because I need to resize my photos in Windows in Paint). (If you think they’re still crooked, don’t give me a hard time about it, some of these angles were hard to judge. >.> )

THAT ASIDE, here’s my new favourite Dutch city. Nearly 100 pictures of it.

The following three days were the highlight of my trip! I’ve got a separate post for each day because I took so many pictures on these days. Ever since I found out mosasaurs were named for the Meuse/Maas River, and definitely since Tharash gave me a mosasaur tooth for Christmas, I wanted to go see Mosasaur Central – I mean Maastricht. Continue reading →