Saturday & Sunday 24-25 September - Eindhoven

Where's Bertie? He's in a motorhome parking slot at P&R Meerhoven, on the west side of Eindhoven, where it costs €4 for 24 hours. There's a grey water drain here, but no other services. Exact location: 51.43496, 5.42441.
Weather: Sat: persistent light rain all morning, dry but overcast afternoon. Mid-teens. Sun: Sunny morning, sunny intervals in the afternoon, with some attempts at showers. 20 degrees.

Saturday
We started with an early breakfast and a drive* to Karpendonkse Plas on the east side of Eindhoven, where we sat in a car park occupied by just us and a dodgy looking chap in a Corsa. Watching the rain come down didn't instill us with enthusiasm to go out in it, but at quarter to nine we trotted off to say hello to the parkrun volunteers.

It was our first parkrun in the Netherlands, and a couple of things struck me as stereotypically Dutch: 1) On both laps of the lake we ran past a prostitute openly soliciting in daylight on a street corner; 2) after the run one of the other runners got changed before cycling home, so she stood in front of us, chatting away as she whipped off her top (no bra underneath) and changed into a dry one, then repeated with her shorts. All we were lacking was seeing a windmill, some clogs and some hash cake on sale for the full set of stereotypical Dutchness. Alas the cafe at the nearby Athletics club, where we all gathered afterwards, didn't have any type of cake, nor pastries. We were hungry by the time we dragged ourselves away at 11.30am!

My time, whilst not as fast as last week (I was meant to be taking it easy but managed to be neither fast nor slow), says I wasn't shuffling to the extent suggested by this snap. 

We had already decided that this rainy day wasn't one for doing anything else out of doors, and once we'd relocated to the Park and Ride we stuck to that, even though the weather perked up far more than forecast. Indeed, it stayed largely dry all afternoon.

I chivvied us for a quick walk around the block after tea, but that was the sum of the afternoon's activity.

Sunday
Yesterday afternoon I researched things we could do whilst around Eindhoven and on the agenda today was the Wings of Liberation Museum**, which sounded right up our street.

Via a quick trip to Lidl (turns out supermarkets are open in NL on a Sunday), we made the 16km drive up to the town of Best and the museum.

The main subject of the museum is Operation Market Garden, which took place over the course of 10 days in September 1944 before it failed for being 'a bridge too far'. It's an unusual thing, having a museum dedicated to such a small period of time, but with the assistance of the Audio Guide, some help from Google Translate (many of the information signs were monolingual), and Mick's prior knowledge of the Operation, it was an interesting three hours we spent there. Reasonable value for the €11 each entrance fee.

There were three smaller rooms, and one bigger. This is part of the bigger, which contained planes and vehicles.

Mick listens intently to the audio guide

"What are the chances?" I exclaimed as I read the information sign next to the engine. "Conrad is just making a model of one of these!". Pity my photo has bleached the colour out of the information sign photo, as it was indeed bright yellow.

Our visit ended with Mick flying a Dakota over Rotterdam and Den Haag, and into Valkenburg - a Dutch Naval base he'd visited when in the RAF.

The museum, being housed in unheated concrete buildings, was rather on the cool side, so it was something of a relief to emerge back out into a sunny and warm afternoon.

A quick, late lunch in Bertie then a little tootle 4km along the road for a fun hour at a petrol station:

The 'fun' bit of that statement may have been a lie.

Yep, I'd declared it to be laundry day. Far from the cheapest laundry facilities, but they gain bonus points for the convenience of being able to park adjacent. On reflection, 4pm is not a good time of day to do laundry. It needs to be done in the morning on a sunny day so that anything that comes out of the drier still a bit damp can be aired on the dashboard.

With that done, back to the Park & Ride we came - via a rather slow route as I'd forgotten that whilst looking at trip distances a couple of days ago I'd set Google Maps to avoid motorways (we're right next to a motorway here, as is the town we'd just come from). On the plus side, it gave us the opportunity to resolve the issue of Bertie's 'low fuel' light having come on. At 186.9/litre, we are slightly kicking ourselves for failing to fill up before we left Belgium, where it was 10c/litre cheaper.

^{(*Our impressions of driving in the Netherlands thus far: narrow lanes, far too many block paved or cobbled roads, and raised junctions or speed humps every few hundred metres.
**I also quite fancied the DAF museum, but with museums being closed on Mondays, to go to both the Wings of Liberation and DAF would have required us to stay until at least Tuesday.)}