It is my profound good fortune to get to see a lot of different things, across a wide variety of disciplines; sometimes in different languages (which is difficult, as I am a slope-browed mono-linguist)
Mostly, to be upfront with you, I just like to run around having fun and learning things.
Thus it was that I took an English-speaking, German-trim Prius to the Netherlands to visit a seal hospital.
The hospital is in a town called Pieterburen, which is north of Groningen- I’m sure you follow their football team- and I reached it in about six hours, blasting out of Frankfurt down an Autobahn.
A Prius is the right car for a jaunt like this, with its superior fuel economy, as the petrol prices in Europe are pretty steep compared to what we’re used to on this side of the Atlantic. An English speaking navigation system is a godsend in a situation like this, as most of the highway signage was difficult to comprehend.
The car fit in well among the sea of European micro-cars stacked ‘n’ packed along every boulevard and narrow side street in every city I drove it in- Frankfurt and Wiesbaden in Germany, Groningen and Pieterburen in the Netherlands.
Dutch culture is intensely interesting every step of the way, and the seal hospital is a great aspect of it. Do it as a day trip- it’s about an hour drive from the larger city of Groningen, with a lot of reasonably priced places to stay.
The payoff at the end of the whole thing is touring the facility (Zeehondencreche, it’s called) where seals found sick or injured in the nearby Wadden Sea. It’s incredibly cute, of course, but also an expression of the Dutch commitment to monitoring and caring for their environment.
So getting back to where I began; I just did this trip at random to see some places I hadn’t been before, but I highly recommend it. With excellent scenery and culture every step of the way, it doesn’t really matter how-or-where you go. It’s a great drive, and that’s what I like.
