Travelin’ With Mom Netherlands And Belgium Visit Was A Real Trip

I was driving the rental car. Signe, my girlfriend, was in the passenger seat navigating, and my mother was in the back seat trying to pronounce the Dutch road signs - our primary form of entertainment during a three-day road trip through Holland.

Our basic plan was not to have one. But armed with a collection of brochures Mom had picked up at the airport, we seemed destined to hit the tourist attractions with the best marketing schemes. This was not my preferred manner of travel, but with Mom picking up the tab, I had to make a few concessions, which also included eating in restaurants that actually clean their silverware.

First stop: The Hedge Maze in Vaals.

The whole point of this tourist attraction, a giant maze of shrubbery, is to get lost - a pretty risky venture when you consider that most of the well-to-do tourists I saw there seemed like the type normally willing to pay large amounts of money to make sure they always know where they are.

Locating the maze wasn’t difficult; the owners had put up plenty of signs. Apparently, they didn’t want us to get lost until after they’d taken our money.

On to Belgium.

Somehow, we ended up in Belgium, probably because our free map made each Avis rental office look twice as big as Amsterdam, covering up much of the vital information we needed to navigate. There were no border checkpoints or signs along the highway to alert us. We just began to notice a lot more little “B” stickers on the cars.

We decided, as long as we were in Belgium, we’d have coffee in Antwerp. My mother thought the word “Antwerp” was the funniest thing ever. And the thought of the people being called Antwerps just killed her. When we reached the center of town and illegally parked in the town square (because we had no Belgian money for a parking meter), Mom pointed at the first people she saw and exclaimed, “Oh, look! Antwerps!” We all found this extremely funny, because in her zeal to locate an Antwerp, she had inadvertently pointed out a group of Taiwanese tourists.

Just over the Dutch border, we stopped at the Delta Expo information center and saw a movie about the famous Dutch dikes. We learned how the Dutch engineers Fought Back The Sea - And WON! At least Signe and I did. Mom slept through most of the film.

After the movie, we went outside and gazed at an actual dike, which looked like a giant hydroelectric plant. We determined - call it a major historical discovery - there was no way some little kid named Peter could have saved the Netherlands from flooding by sticking his finger in a huge dike.

We continued driving up the coast to Den Haag, stopping along the way at Madurodam, a unique Dutch theme park. The founder, Mrs. B. Boon-van der Starp, must have been some kind of marketing genius, because she got the funding to build an entire theme park consisting solely of miniature versions of Holland’s architectural marvels. (“Wait,” you say, “what Dutch architectural marvels?” Exactly!)

Well, there it all was - the Netherlands on a 1:25 scale. The cows were the size of Barbie Doll furniture. High-steepled churches were the height of grandfather clocks. And the dikes were the size of… I don’t want to talk about the dikes anymore. The miniature airport had real moving planes. The tiny oil tanker had a real fire on board. A miniature water skier on one of the small lakes had wiped out at least a month before, judging by the algae growing on his body.

On to the famous Dutch tulips….

I’d always imagined seeing the Dutch tulips meant wandering around the countryside, knee-deep in flowers. Hardly. If you went tromping through the tulip fields, Dutch tulip farmers would probably come out and whack you in the head with their wooden shoes. In reality, seeing the Dutch tulips meant driving past occasional fields of tulips in the rental car, then paying $10 to visit Keukenhof, a giant theme park southwest of Amsterdam where Dutch tulips have been arranged in neat rows by professional gardeners, and you can buy souvenirs every 50 meters.

The upside was that the park featured about 6 million beautiful flowers. The downside: The most spectacular flowers were in a greenhouse under careful supervision and, with the exception of a motorized faux-windmill, the place lacked a certain Dutch flavor.

The flowers in the park weren’t all tulips; there were lots of other kinds. Or so I was told. I couldn’t really tell them apart. And the flowers’ names didn’t give anything away. Some could have been body parts, like “Maxima Lutea,” and some sounded like … well, “Shirley.” The unusual names make some sense when you consider most of the plants were genetically developed. The original, non-genetically-altered tulips in the park - there were about 10 of them - were the dumpiest looking plants in the place.

After a quick tour of Gouda, which my mother thought would be a tremendously cute town because they make cheese there (and it was), we dropped Mom and her four metric tons of souvenirs at the airport the next morning. In all honesty, this lady is an exceptional tourist and mother, and I’m not just saying that because she paid for everything, including the rental car, which we abandoned in a parking lot. (Just kidding, Mom.)