It was a big hassle to get to the Kröller-Müller Museum, but it was worth it. While the museum had a breathtaking collection, I have had my fair share of Van Gogh’s and Picasso’s split between going to the Van Gogh Museum and the Yale Art Gallery—the art museum 15 minutes from my house. What was most engaging for me was riding a bike through De Hoge Veluwe National Park. Cycling has been one of the few sports that I have enjoyed through my life—it is like running but you get to sit. I love it for the places that it can take me and how fast you can go on a bike. While the bikes that were given to us for the ride through the national park were—by any definition of the word—fast, it was at least fun and every place I went, was beautiful in its desolation. The entire area felt so far removed from the general built environment that is tightly packed buildings with narrow streets in front, it felt stimulating in a completely different way. The mix of deforested areas and not made for quite an interesting scene to behold.
While the area was interesting, the bikes were interesting in a totally different way. They piqued my interest because of how they were utilized. I do not entirely know how the system worked, but it seemed as though because could just ride the bikes as they pleased as long as they were placed in designated areas. I absolutely love this idea to just allow people free access to bikes in a park of any scale. I think that it adds so much more nuance to the experience because you can cover so much more ground on a bike, and experiencing the park at the moderate speed a bike allows for is much different if you had to walk along the paths for tens of minutes before a change of scenery. On the bikes changes were evident within two minutes. What a simple but ingenious addition to the national park.