For Utrecht one leaves Amsterdam via the Amstel Dyke and the Utrechtsche Zyde, and after forty kilometres of roadway, mostly brick-paved like that between Haarlem and Amsterdam, he reaches suburban Utrecht. Utrecht, with but a hundred thousand inhabitants, has suburbs, reaching out in every direction, that would do justice to a city five times it size. Most of Utrecht's population is apparently suburban, and is housed in little brick houses and villas with white trimmings and door-steps, a bulb garden, an iron fence, and a miniature canal flowing through the back yard. This is the formula for laying out a Utrecht suburban villa.
The Het Kasteel van Antwerpen, on the Oude Gracht, is a hotel which treats you very well for five or six florins a day, and allows you also to put your automobile under roof, charging nothing for the service. This is worth making a note of in a country where it usually costs from one to five francs a night for your automobile.
The chief sight of Utrecht is its cathedral, with a fine Gothic tower over a hundred metres in height. It is the proper thing to mount to its highest landing, whence one gets one of the most remarkable bird's-eye views imaginable. In a flat country like Holland, the wide-spread panoramas, taken from any artificial height, embrace an extent of the world's surface not elsewhere to be taken in by a glance of the eye. The Zuyder-Zee and the lowlands of the north stretch out to infinity on one side; to the east the silver-spreading streaks of the Waal and the Oude Rijn (later making the Rhine) lead off toward Germany. To the south are the green-grown prairies and windmill-outlined horizons of South Holland; and westward are the polders and dunes of the region between Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and even a glimpse, on a clear day, of the North Sea itself.
Our one long ride in Holland was from Utrecht to Nymegen, seventy-two kilometres. We left Utrecht after lunch and slowly made our way along the picture landscapes of the Holland countryside, through Hobbema avenues, and under the shadow of quaint Dutch church spires.
One does not go to a foreign land to enjoy only the things one sees in cities. Hotels, restaurants, and cafés are very similar all over Europe, and the great shops do not vary greatly in Rotterdam from those in Liverpool. It is with the small things of life, the doings of the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker that the change comes in. In Holland the housekeeper buys her milk from a little dog-drawn cart and can be waked at three in the morning, without fail, by leaving an order the night before with the "morning waker." If you do not have a fire going all the time, and want just enough to cook your dinner with, you go out and buy a few lumps of blazing coals. If it is boiling water you want for your coffee, you go out and buy it too. Holland must be a housekeeper's paradise.
Nymegen, on the Waal, cared for us for the night. On the morrow we were to cross the frontier and enter Germany and the road by the Rhine.
Nymegen and its Hotel Keizer Karel, on the Keizer Karel Plain, was a vivid memory of what a stopping-place for the night between two objective points should be.
The city was delightful, its tree-grown boulevards, its attractive cafés, the music playing in the park, and all the rest was an agreeable interlude, and the catering—if an echo of things Parisian—was good and bountiful. There was no fuss and feathers when we arrived or when we left, and not all the personnel of the hotel, from the boots to the manager, were hanging around for tips. The head waiter and the chambermaid were in evidence; that was all. The rest were discreetly in the background.