friendly frogs and rental cars

This post is from Last week in Delft... my apologies for the delay... so much to tell, so little attention span.

Just before I sat down to write this, I had gotten back from the centre of town (it is about 10:30pm right now) and headed up to bed, when something scurried across the floor—for a moment I got heebie jeebies that it might be a mouse, though this place is super clean I really couldn’t imagine it… when said creature froze in the middle of the floor I saw it was a toad!

So, I tried various approaches to get it out because lord only knows how dutch treat toads—I wanted to protect it from some unspeakable fate…  :) only joking

My approach?

1) plastic cups convinced it only further under the table and behind the cords…

 2) Toad was indifferent to my banging on the table…

 3) my opening the door and making smoochie sounds didn’t work, so

4) I encouraged it verbally out the door. Also failed.   

Conclusion??

Dutch frogs do not speak English.

The tiniest (and greatest) car ever...

Despite that the rental car place needed something with my address on it in order to rent to me (my address is currently is a storage unit in Berkeley thus I did not have it), I managed to sweet talk/laugh my way into just giving the gentleman every card in my wallet to make an imprint of.  He in turn gave me keys to this sweet blue Ford, DIESEL. J  

(Btw, if Ford would like to buy this photo from me, as the automakers of our renewable future... comment to my blog and we'll work out an agreement.)

Anyway...

The gentlemen in the shop tried to give me the only pink car in the station but I had thoughts otherwise.

In tribute to the late and sexy Patrick Swayze, NOBODY puts Baby in the corner and NOBODY gives Jessie keys to a pink car.

The only time I got lost today was in trying to get out of Delft.  Despite my new “TomTom” (explanation coming), I could not find my way out of said Medieval city (they knew what they were doing to enemies even then hundreds of years ago!) because so many roads were blocked or under construction. So I did laps, and made turns on roads which I could NOT believe were roads (they were small), but alas, my 3-foot wide car sure enough fit down them and I pretty much decided my route based on facial expressions from people I passed. I got no frowns, no swears, horns, or middle fingers, so I think I done right.  J 

TOM TOM!!!!

TomToms are the greatest GPS we never had.  First of all, they are CORRECT and they have graphics of all the turns you are going to make including what signs look like on the highway. They also give you directions 2 ahead of time.  For example, “in 800 yards make a left, then stay in the left lane, go 400 yards and make another left!”  This was amazing and far surpasses any US GPS unit I have ever found.
OH TomTom, won’t you come back with me to the US and marry me?  

Here are a couple more photos from my great rental car day...  This is blue car in front of the levee.  The people are on top of the levee for scale.

And lastly, (yes I took this while driving), the landscape patterns of canals and agriculture...

Highlights from this trip:

photos to come in a future post... the massive scale of the flood defences, the geometric patterns of the landscape (canals, agriculture), dunes, standing in the North Sea...