GoneWacko’s Blog

GoneWacko’s grand day out

January 5, 2006 on 12:57 pm | In Life |

Last saturday I went to family in the south of the Netherlands, in the city of Venlo, to celebrate new year’s eve.
I had taken my laptop along, because you never know when you might want to show the stuff you did for school or whatever. Plus I have VNC- and FTP-servers running on my PC, so I can do virtually anything from anywhere in the world.
Anyhow, on Sunday we headed back to Ede, which is where I live, in the middle of the Netherlands (the topographical center of the Netherlands lies within Ede’s municipality, I believe).

Today I take out my laptop because I had to check something for school and, wouldn’t you know it, I conclude that my power supply is still in Venlo…

Thinking of the various solutions to my problem, I find out that the quickest and above all cheapest way is to just go to Venlo by train and pick it up. (I can travel by train for free outside of the weekends because I’m a student)
It’s times like these when I’m happy that the Netherlands are so very tiny.
I got on a train in Ede at 4:45 PM. At 6:20 PM I was in the south of the Netherlands. This is quite a bit of time, but it’s mainly because:

• I had to transfer to a different train, which meant waiting for 30 minutes.
• I was in a train that stopped at every station along the tracks.

So anyways, one moment I’m in my hometown, the other moment I’m in the city my family lives in - family which I see maybe once or twice a year.
I had dinner over at their place, and then I went back home.

Usually when I go to family, it was planned quite a few weeks in advance. However, today, I just went without any planning or anything (after discussing it with my nephew, over MSN). That plus the fact that I had never travelled there by train before (as far as I can recall at least), made it an interesting experience.

Still, in total I did travel about 2×90 kilometers (back and forth, or actually forth and back). The trains went from Ede to Arnhem to Nijmegen to Venlo, which is an interesting route because the only traintrips I usually undertake are from Ede to Arnhem, where my school is.