My bike started with a mushy back tire but I enjoyed my tour along the polders.
I have embraced bicycle and public transit during my stay in Wageningen. Dutch bike lanes never disappear and leave you wondering where you belong, and the landscape is relatively flat and kind to those unused to the saddle. On Thursday I rented a bike and visited some nearby sites such as Doorwerth Castle.
Ellen and I in Nijmegen
On Friday I toured by bus, tram and train around some nearby towns like Arnhem, Nijmegen and Amsterdam to do some visiting but also see the landscape. A big highlight, personally and professionally, was seeing former MES Ellen Chappell who is now doing her PhD at Radboud University in Nijmegen, and walking with her to the famous Making Room for the River project that was completed there a decade ago. The Waal River would often overspill its banks in the tight curve near the city, and so landscape architects retreated a dyke 250 metres into the town of Lent on the opposite shore, and created a river by-pass to store more water that required 50 houses to be relocated (as per Edelenbos et al., 2015). What you can see below are houses that survived that process, now on an island joined to the towns by 3 new bridges, with the original channel on the right and the new channel on the left. And what houses they are!
The Room for the River project on the Waal River, between Lent and Nijmegen, the original channel to the right
The new Waal channel, dug to Make Room for the River at Nijmegen
