Toine's partner, Jeanne, set up breakfast buffet style in the small common kitchen area for us and the guests in the adjoining room. It was exceptionally good, with fresh fruit and buns, nice cheeses and a baked egg dish on a hot plate. The other guests were supposedly escaping winter in South Africa but told us that their normal winter weather was much warmer and drier than the spring conditions here. It was cool and cloudy again today, with rain clouds threatening.
Unusual sculptural work high on the wall of a building near the bicycle museum.
We were staying in Nijmegen today partly to visit the Nationaal Fietsmuseum Velorama, the bicycle museum which we had read about on Phil Prosser's journal (http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/9815). We had also thought of doing a short loop ride through the hill country near the German border, but nixed that idea after checking the weather forecast—more rain. The bicycle museum is located right on the waterfront about a kilometre from our B&B, and we arrived there just as it opened at 10:00 along with quite a number of other visitors, who were also very happy to get out of the cold and wet. It's a remarkable place, on three floors, displaying every conceivable type of bicycle and other human-powered vehicle, dating from the early 1800s to the present. Here are some photos:
One of the rooms of very old wheeled contraptions. There were so many old bi-tri-and-quadricycles on display that it was almost overwhelming.
Even though we weren't cycling, just looking at all those bicycles gave us an appetite for lunch, and we made our way uphill in the rain through the Valkof park to the strikingly modern Museum het Valkof. After sandwiches and coffee in the pleasant cafeteria, we spent several hours checking out the interesting regional history displays and the Roman artifacts in the glass walled building.
Roman artifacts unearthed around Nijmegen on display at het Valkhof Museum.
Nijmegen is considered the oldest city in the Netherlands, dating from 70 BC, when the Romans built an encampment there because of its strategic hilly (!) location, which provides a good view of the Waal river and the Rhine valley. By the end of the first century AD Nijmegen had become an important Roman city. Since then it has had a checkered history, including being mistakenly bombed to smithereens in 1944 by American pilots who thought they were bombing a German city. You can read more about the town's history in the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nijmegen.
Later in the afternoon when the rain let up, we walked several kilometres uphill and down, through the city centre to the train station to buy our tickets for tomorrow's journey to Amsterdam. There were a few streets with picturesque old buildings, but much of the centre had been rebuilt after WWII. Many of the stores were closed on this Sunday afternoon. We were surprised to find that walking in the hilly terrain was quite tiring, and in the evening were glad to find another restaurant for dinner only a short distance from the B&B.
