Day 60, can you believe it, I certainly can’t. In many ways the past 2 months have flown by and in other ways I have crammed so much into that 60 days it’s incredible.
With my final destination of Amsterdam now in sight, it is great that I can kick back and take things easy for the final two weeks.
And that is exactly what I did today. After setting out from Roermond my target for the day was Broekhuizen a leisurely 40 km away along the River Maas.
After visiting the tourist office in Roermond and getting general directions I decided not to pay another 9.5 euro for a special bike track map. Big mistake. Venlo, the first stop along the way, was just 22 km away but by the time I had done 28km I was only halfway there, so decided to call it a day.
I took a wrong turn somewhere and got hopelessly lost without an adequate map, so Kessel it was for the night.
Kessel is a lovely little town with an historic 12th century medieval fortress that I took the time to tour. The fortress was bombed by the Germans in the Second World War and everything that had been built over the previous 200 years was destroyed. But not the original stone structure, it stayed put and it is now the foundation for a major reconstruction program that is due to start any time now.
Kessel, and the River Maas which it sits alongside, was the front line of the war in late 1944 with the Germans on one side of the river and the Allies on the other.
The big loser was the town itself, with just about everything flattened. Even today more than 60 years later they are rebuilding, with a lot of effort going into the planning of the reconstruction of the town’s medieval fortress.
With a new map now purchased hopefully I can get back on track tomorrow, but who knows where I will end up??
captions: Pic 1: My first windmill. Pic 2: The old fortress at Kessel.
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