22 - 5-22015 Last Day in Haarlem

Friday - May 22

We spent a leisurely day today in Haarlem.  We visited the cathedral  next door that we've been viewing out our window, ate breakfast at a nearby cafe and in general just walked down streets we hadn't been down before. Other than that, we kicked back before our long drive tomorrow.

St. Bavo, the name of the cathedral next door, is beautiful inside. It is famous for its Muller Organ, considered one of the greatest instruments in the world for its tone and decoration.  It has 5080 pipes, is 100 feet high and is a Wow! moment when you first see it. Among famous personages who have played it are Mozart (at age 10!) and Handel. The organ was being played periodically during the day. We first heard it from our hotel room - Pam thought it sounded like Lon Chaney scary movie music. But sitting in the church and hearing those low, low notes and high, high notes bracket a powerful mid-range was, for want of a better word, thrilling.


The first evening that we were here we heard one of the church bells  sound  a somewhat subdued one-note peal for a solid half hour and thought the bell ringer had gone wacko!  Turns out that this occurs every evening at 9-9:30pm to signify the closing of the gates. The gates vanished long, long ago yet the tradition carries on. Now that we know the story, it's actually a pretty sound... sort of.

The gelato is yummy....Pam is double-dipping!

Turns out our hotel is another Rick Steves' favorite - two groups on one of his 21-day "Best of Europe" tours were rotating out when we arrived and, as we sit here in the lobby enjoying the bustle and using our tablets, a new group is starting to pile in.

Pam found a cafe around the corner that brought back fond memories of the 70's...

So back to the story that Norm alluded to at the end of the day before yesterday's e-mail - when the hotel clerk's face turned ashen and he gave us a dire warning......

On Wednesday when we arrived in Haarlem our Peugeot's SatNav witch suddenly flipped out and quit giving us directions.  We switched to our trusty Garmin and she took us right to the hotel front door (Good Garmin). When the receptionist saw our car in front of the hotel, he asked how we got there....and became very stressed.  It transpired that all of the area around the hotel and main square is for most of the day restricted to pedestrians and bikes. Surrounding the area, streets leading in have cylindrical metal posts in the middle that move up and down electronically to let only cars that can activate a reader (such as taxis) pass through. We knew what these things are, but in this case, on this street, the post was down and there was a green light on an adjacent post. We figured the post was deactivated for some reason. Wrong. Whatever we thought, we must have arrived very shortly after a permitted car had gone through.

The clerk kept trying to check us in all the while eyeing our car. "You mustn't be there" he kept repeating. The area is off limits to you and you can be heavily fined for being there. Didn't we know what would happen if the post had come up while our car was over it? Didn't we know that by now the post would be up again and we'd be stuck?  Heck, we'd read that the hotel had on-site parking. Wrong! By this time, Norm was ready to start sucking sugar-free candies real fast, three at a time.

So, dump the luggage in the lobby, jump back into the car and head back the way we came - only to see the post "up" with red lights around its top edge staring at us balefully. Trapped! Meanwhile, natives passing by on bikes gave us snickering looks.  That's when we noticed a black BMW with it's rear hatch up in front of a nearby restaurant. While Norm kept the Peugeot's hazard blinkers flashing in full emergency mode and on the lookout for gendarmes, Pam found the owner of the BMW who, it transpired, was there most legitimately since he owns the restaurant. Sure we could follow him out if we'd give him a few minutes. Longish story ending, we followed him out as closely as we'd followed that Alfa out of the parking garage in Spain. Paul, his name, had us follow him to a parking garage and then very graciously drove us back to the hotel where we figured we'd find the clerk in a quivering, catatonic state. He was okay, but still kept warning us about our foolish ways. But we're not foolish, we're from California and what about all those churches we've been visiting on this trip?