Largest parking lot on earth

We've all heard horror stories of really terrible traffic jams, right? I'm not talking about your typical garden variety traffic problem - the ones that you encounter on your daily commute into the city. I'm talking about the really bad ones. The 100 car pile ups. 4+ hour delays. Sleeping overnight in your car. That sort of thing.

Well, this past Tuesday morning, the Netherlands experienced one of those events. And it wasn't just the A2, or the A4, or the N205. Nope. Name a highway in the vicinity of the randstad and I can guarantee that there was a backup on it that morning. It was so bad that highways were stacked up the entire width of the country, leaving some roads backed up for miles simply because they intersected with one that had an accident on it. There was no way around them. All said, it totaled 876 KM. For the metricly challenged, that is more than 540 miles of parking lot.

The Netherlands is only 150 miles long and 100 miles wide. Damn!

Trucks hanging off bridges. Multi-car pile ups. Highways completely shut down. And the trains didn't fair much better. Lots of delays and closed lines there as well. Funny what a little bit of snow and the end of a holiday weekend will bring. DC used to be the same way...but on a much smaller scale.

Thank goodness that I was having a bout of insomnia and was already in the office by 6:15. The roads were no problem, if you are used to driving on a bit of snow and ice.

Luck

We've had some really nasty storms here in Northern Europe over last week, characterized mostly by extremely heavy winds. One morning, at 6:30 AM no less, I got stuck in a 27 KM traffic jam because a tractor trailer had blown over on the highway. And I saw a girl get swept off a dike while she was riding her bike. It was almost comical when a strong gust of wind came up and just forcefully shoved her bike sideways over the dike...luckily she wasn't hurt.

Here are a few other lucky folks that managed to weather the storm.



They started setting up the beach bars in Bloemendaal just in time for the storm. There is normally 100 yards of nice flat beach in front of the bars. I think one more day of heavy wind would have toppled this guy's livelihood into the sea.

Unbelievably lucky! This isn't stock footage...I just happened to have my camera with me when I went for a walk around my new office in Utrecht. This guy forgot to put his car in gear and the winds were just heavy enough to nudge him toward the canal. There are maybe 5 trees the whole way along the water...this guy was extremely lucky to be parked just in front of one of them.

North Central Europe got hit even heavier than we did. We're lucky that Schiphol airport has three runways all facing different directions. Even in heavy storms like this they can almost always still take-off and land on one runway that faces directly into the wind. The situation in Hamburg, Germany is not so fortunate. They are forced to land in a crosswind direction. This footage is amazing. I guess that the sideways landing is an accepted "technique" for cross-wind landing, but I can't imagine what it felt like for the passengers. Well, actually I can. I was on a flight taking off from Seattle back in the early 90's that was the last plane allowed to leave before a hurricane hit. We got swept sideways just as we left the ground and the wing-tip on the side of the plane that I was sitting on just missed the ground. Not fun. The video is not for anyone with a fear of flying...especially since you know that they had to loop around and try the landing again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z42fchrzhHY

And...completely unrelated to the storms in Europe is this video of an airport in Honduras. They say it is the most dangerous approach in the world for any international airport. Just when you think you are going to land you continue to follow the contour of the mountain downward to the very, very short runway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loyKfeV7NFg&feature=related

....

AHA!!!! I KNEW IT!!!

I just really needed to mark this as a day to remember....

Ol' fashioned fairy tales

We were walking with a friend in Den Bosch the other day when we came across a set of narrow canals crisscrossing the city. While this is not unusual in itself here in the Netherlands, these particular canals caught our attention because of the way that some of the buildings hung out over the water and there were some small patches of greenspace along their banks (kind of unusual). Then we noticed a pair of route signs used to direct self-guided boat tours through the canals. Pretty cool! But then, we also saw a large troll like figure standing on the banks, easily viewable from the boats. Even cooler! A little bit of a “Story book forest” type of self guided tour. The picture above is not the best, but you can see one of the figures on the banks of the canal on the right.

As we continued further along and crossed the canal system again at a different place we saw another figure…a good old fashioned Frog Troll. And what’s he doing? Is he a happy little troll waving to the kiddies? Nope. Maybe he’s a mean troll, making faces to try and scare them? Again, nope. This little bugger is hungry! Isn’t that great!! Of all the fairy tales of my childhood I was never presented with something like this - those are some kid's legs hanging out of his mouth. Of course there were parts of stories like Hansel and Gretel (German story by the way), where the kids are slated to become lunch. But did you ever see it happening? Nooooo….wouldn’t want to hurt our little psyches, right? Way too traumatic. Well, these Frog Trolls don’t take shit from anyone. They hungry? They gonna eat! "I like popping the heads first. Crunchy. Then you can suck out the middle. Mmmm. Lekker!"

We’ve become too soft…

They also had some statues around town for the more adult oriented audiences. We came across this great little number on one of the side squares beside the big church - A naked matador woman ready to deal the death blow to a raging bull….which also happens to be really a man. Now that's art!

And we weren’t done yet! They also had a great old fort that kiddies of all ages could play in. I think that the last time that I had a picture of me sitting on a cannon was one taken at Devil’s Den in Gettysburg back in 1973. Gotta love a second childhood…or is this still my first?