Utrecht

Another beautiful day Saturday, so we went to Utrecht. First, because I had never been there and had heard it was cool. And second, because we wanted to test ride a folding tandem at Kok Fietsen.

There was a lot to see and do, and we only saw and did a little bit of it. After our test ride, we had lunch at a recommended café (Restaurant de Zakkendrager, pictured above) with a garden view right in the middle of the city.

After lunch we visited "the most cheerful museum in the Netherlands", the Speelklok Museum, which features "automatically playing musical instruments from the 15th century to the present day". We learned that the first mechanical musical devices were created for municipal or church clocks, to alert residents that the clock in the tower was about to strike the hour. Kind of an early version of "synchronize your watches",  before personal timepieces existed. We saw (and heard) several exquisite early drawing room musical clocks and curiosities, a Steinway pianola, and an amazing player piano with mechanical violin trio, the Hupfeld Phonoliszt Violina. Their collection also includes belly organs (played by organ grinders of old) and an array of street organs, a sort of national instrument of the Netherlands. Spoiler alert, don't watch this if you might visit this excellent museum:

It was time for a pick me up, so we stopped for coffee (and beer and Chocomel) at a cafe on a bridge that crosses the Oude Gracht ("Old Canal"). That gave us the energy we needed to ascend more than 400 steps to the top of the Dom Tower, the tallest church tower in the Netherlands. The view was great, and it was fun to look waaaaaaaaay down and see where we had been.

No discussion of Utrecht is complete unless it touches on Miffy, Dick Bruna's whimsical rabbit character. She appears everywhere, including the shop at the Speelklok Museum:

Not sure I even knew there were folding tandems before we came to the Netherlands - it just crossed my radar when we started to investigate bike touring with our tandem, which is too big to go on the train. The tandem we tried out is made by Multicycle, and folds quite simply with a hinge just before the front seat. It was awesome - comfortable and easy to ride.

Aside from the great things we saw in Utrecht, it was a good follow up to my Happy Biking post - Utrecht's city planners have really figured out a great carrot-and-stick approach to the problem of cars taking over a city's streets.

First the stick - parking in the city is expensive and hard to find, and the streets are narrow or often simply closed to car traffic. We saw some cars in town, but more buses, and a lot of bikes. The carrot is cheap and plentiful parking just outside the city centers. We drove to Utrecht, about 90 minutes from home, and left the car in a parking garage just off the motorway. For four euros we were able to validate our parking ticket, which doubled as a transit pass for up to five people. We walked across the street to a bus stop, waited just a few minutes, and found ourselves in the city center in about 10 minutes. Painless!

We've seen videos of hordes of cyclists in Utrecht; now we know why there are a remarkable number of folks in that city who choose to get around by bike. Can't resist including one of the videos here:

A note to my friends in the U.S.: yes, there are no helmets. Bicycle-auto crashes are uncommon in the Netherlands, and crashes resulting in injuries even rarer. Consider: because of the forces involved, neck injuries are common in automobile crashes. Do you or your passengers wear neck braces when driving or riding in a car, to prevent injury in case of a crash?