Nathan’s Musings

On Monday, October 1st, I started my new job in Alicante. I decided to drive down to Spain during the preceding weekend. The total distance from Almere (Netherlands) to Alicante is about 2070 km–more than I was prepared to drive in one day. So I planned the trip as follows: on Saturday I would drive to Perpignan in the south of France, get together with a fellow photographer I know down there, spend the night in a hotel in the centre of the town, leaving me with about 700 km to drive the next day.

But things do not always go according to plan. I had a terrible Friday night, perhaps because of the anxiety about starting a new life in Spain, or more prosaically, too much pizza and beer on Friday evening. Most likely it was the combination of the two. Be that as it may, instead of leaving at some heroic early-morning hour, I ended up departing Almere around noon, not a good thing to do when 1350 km lie ahead…

Even though the main purpose of the drive was to get to Alicante, I was determined to take some pictures along the way. The first stop was just before the Belgian border. Netherlands was saying goodbye to me with the usual drizzly rain.

I crossed into Belgium, still “enjoying” the free car wash I was getting from the sky. The drive past Antwerp and Brussels was uneventful. South of Brussels, I left the E411 motorway (direction Luxembourg) to pass by Overijse, a place where we lived from 1995 to 2000, and from where I have very fond memories.

Overijse used to have a very significant grape business. It still identifies itself with grapes: there is an annual grape festival, complete with a Grape Queen beauty pageant, and there is a big Druivenstreek sign on the motorway. But the reality is that Belgian grapes cannot compete on price with grapes from southern Europe, and the industry in and around Overijse is a shadow of its former self, barely surviving on selling small quantities to people who are willing and able to pay triple the price of Italian or Spanish grapes.

There two pictures were taken along a road which I passed at least twice a day for five years. As is apparent from these images, the rain had followed me through Belgium, and it continued in Luxembourg. No pictures from there–it is a small place, and the only reason I even stopped there was that petrol is much cheaper than in France, which I was about to enter.

Finally, somewhere near Lyon, the rain had stopped and I could enjoy the landscape of “la France profonde”.

…as well as this classic French toilet:

At this point I thought that the worst of the drive was over. Sure, it was afternoon and I knew that I still had several hundred km to drive in the dark, but at least the weather was good. I called my friend in Perpignan and told him that I would not make it in time to get together in the evening, so we would instead meet for coffee Sunday morning.

Window rolled down, I continued the southward trek. It was getting warm, but since my car’s air condition has not been recharged for about 3 years, rolling down the window was the only option. At this point it is appropriate to say a few words about my car. It is a 1999 Opel Vectra, with about 355.000 km on the odometer. It still runs reliably, but let’s just say that its best days are behind it. Earlier this year, I made a conscious decision to not submit the car to the annual inspection required by Dutch law because I knew that the fine one gets for skipping the inspection, €75, was far lower than the cost of making the repairs necessary for my car to pass the inspection. So the funny noises the car makes from time to time just made the drive more, shall we say, interesting…

Around midnight I was finally getting close to Perpignan, relatively speaking. I was on the A9 motorway which follows the Mediterranean coast towards the Spanish border. Suddenly, the weather turned worse. It started raining, and I could see lightning in the distance. The rain became more and more intense as I drove on; the safe speed was no more than 60 km/h, which just allowed me to avoid a six-car pileup and another accident a few km further down the road. I began to question my sanity and the wisdom of continuing to drive under these conditions. I have lived through Florida hurricanes, but I have never seen so much rain in my life in such a short period of time. And it just continued, for more than 100 km…
Around 2 a.m. I was approaching a rest area. The French motorways are some of the best in the world, and one of the nice things about them is that upcoming rest areas are clealy signposted with the available services. And so, when I saw the hotel pictogram, the decision was made. Even though I was still 130 km short of Perpignan, I would do the sensible thing and check into that hotel for the night, or whatever was left of it. It meant wasting the money I had already paid for the hotel in Perpignan, but at this point getting a few hours of sleep was far more important than saving 60 Euro.
No pictures from the night rain, I was too busy driving. Sunday morning I got up and took a look outside. This had been my home for the night–note the amount of water in the garbage bag:

But at least in was not raining anymore, although the sky still looked threatening. I checked my trunk, which was packed with a couple of suitcases which my wife had carefully prepared for me, along with the suits and shirts I would need in my new job.

Because I still had 900 km to drive, I decided to skip meeting my friend in Perpignan and just get to Alicante as quickly as possible, especially since I had to be in my new office at 9.00 Monday morning. In late morning, I had finally reached the Spanish border.

It was still not really sunny, but at least it was dry and things began to look more promising. About an hour and a half later I had passed Barcelona and was firmly on my way. I stopped to tank up with the cheap Spanish petrol and to check the oil. The signs in the rest area were looking promising:

But Spain is a big county. The distance from Barcelona to Alicante is 550 km, and the A7 motorway just went on and on and on…It seemed endless, and even though the weather was by now excellent and it was daylight, I had by now had enough of driving, seriously.

Finally, around 7 p.m. I arrived at the Ibis hotel on Avenida de Elche in Alicante, which was to be my home for the next three nights. I cannot recall ever being so happy to see the inside of a cheap hotel room.

I was totally wiped out. I am used to long drives, but this one was really long and tiring. But I felt a sense of accomplishment. I had made it, and more importantly, so had my car…

During the next few days, I started settling into my new job and began to enjoy Alicante. The last picture of this story is from Esplanada de Espana in the centre of Alicante, while I was sitting outside the O’Hara Irish pub and sipping a cold pint of Guiness.

Notice the clothes the people are wearing on this October evening…

As I write this, I have been in Alicante for a week. I have spent this weekend relaxing and walking around the city, and if you want to see more of Alicante, visit my weekly pictures page and click on week 40 and subsequent weeks.

I am making a radical change in my life, both in terms of location and career. As of this week, I am working in the public sector for the first time in my life, at EU’s Office for the Harmonization of the Internal Market, based in Alicante. Yesterday was my first day at the new place, spent mainly on getting various formalities taken care of.

It is interesting to work for the EU, and it is exciting to be moving to Spain. But right now, these first days are somewhat nomadic. My home is the Ibis hotel next to the OHIM office, I do not yet have a Spanish mobile phone or any of the other trappings of residence. Most importantly, my wife and daughter are still back in the Netherlands. And I hate being alone. I cannot wait for October 10th, when they will come down here for a week.

Last week I was still working as managing director of Claranet Benelux. On Wednesday night I was having a goodbye dinner with my management team, and the sales director asked me what I would miss most about the Netherlands after having lived there for 4 1/2 years. Somewhat embarassingly, I had to think for a moment, before blurting out the answer, “intelligent traffic lights!” which got a good laugh around the table. I tried to save the situation by talking about how every place has its good and bad sides…but the more I reflect on it, the more I think that my answer was not that bad. See, the Netherlands is not a country with outstanding anything; its cuisine is plain (fortunately, they had colonies whose influence is positively felt in this area), its beer not nearly as good as that brewed by its Belgian neighbours, its climate is decidedly unpleasant, there are no mountains etc. But what the Netherlands does have is a very well arranged, tidy and pleasant country. The intelligent traffic lights are quite illustrative: the Dutch are concerned about the environment, and they are also adept at managing life in a small, crowded place. So many roads have sensors in them so that traffic lights adjust to traffic flow rather than just being timed. This way, traffic on a primary road does not have to stop needlessly at an intersection with a secondary road unless there are actually cars emerging from that secondary road. A small thing, perhaps, but something one really comes to appreciate when living there.

And so it is with many other small things–they are just sensibly done. Daily life consists of an accumulation of seemingly minor things, and the Dutch have mastered the art of making many of those minor things work extremely well.

And of course there is Amsterdam. It is truly a unique city, with its canals, beautiful buildings, and all kinds of strange and wonderful places. For example, the Kattenkabinet, a gallery dedicated solely to art featuring cats, and populated by about 10-20 cats who arrange themselves on top of the furniture and become part of the exhibit. Or the Cracked Kettle, a beer shop founded by a guy from Boston which stocks more varieties of beer than I have ever seen in any one place. Or the Albert Cuyp market, Europe’s oldest continuing street market. One of life’s great pleasures for me was to sit on the Dam with a cold beer on a sunny Sunday afternoon, watching the human traffic pass by, while my wife and daughter would be prowling the shops of Kalverstraat.

This I will definitely miss.