Looking out of the window from our room of the Röderhuis an autumnal scenery mirrored in the harbour of Goedereede. A rich breakfast was awaiting us in the dining room with an open kitchen. The owner was an ancestor of the German artist Röder and the house felt like atelier and art gallery.
The name of the town Goedereede means originally “good roadstead”, a safe anchorage that dates back to the Roman times, when they had already built a castell and vicus at this place.
The name of the former island Goeree is also derived from the name of the town. It is now connected with the former island Voorne by the Haringvlietdam with its sluices. On the other side of the Haringvliet the fortified city of Hellevoetsluis was a real landmark, which was in its cornered shape completely surrounded by a moat. Robert tried to find bicycle maps at the tourist office, but they didn’t fulfil his expectations. He tried his luck at a bike shop close to a huge mall, where we lost each other as it span over a canal with its building and parking decks.
They didn’t have maps either, and sent him to an ANWB shop where he finally found what he was looking for. In the meantime I was lying beside the bikes on a bench for a little nap. People passing by were seeing our bags with the shells on the back and figured immediately that we must be pilgrims on our way to Santiago. But I had to correct them, we were on our way back from there. They were stunned. We had already biked more than 4.700km.
In Zuidland we found a nice restaurant in the centre of the village right beside the church called “Slands bakkie”. We needed some time to realize that something about this place was very special. But just by the way the waiter behaved, who was so wonderfully talkative and told us stories you would never normally hear from a waiter, we found out that this restaurant was a social integration project. It reminded me of our first day of the tour when we were staying in Kempten at the Allgäu ART Hotel, which was also an inclusion project.
In Spijkenisse we left the green fields and entered the first suburbs of the Rotterdam area. As we understood ourselves always as being like Don Quichotte and Sancho Panza of the new era fighting for windmills, I loved this country being so connected to their aeolian past and future. I discovered a place named “Holy-Moly”, which brought another flashback to my mind from the third day of the “Less-is-More-Tour” in Liechtenstein, because Peter Demmel loved to use this expression.
After Spijkenisse we crossed the “Oude Maas” to Hoogvliet, and leaving the suburbs behind us we entered a completely different world of industrial harbours, with highways full of container trucks, railway lines with cargo trains, huge rail cranes and fields of oil tanks. One big oil company had hitchhiked not only the symbol of the Saint James shell, which had travelled for centuries with the Christian pilgrims, but now also presented us its company-logo with the rainbow-flag of the LGBTQ+ movement. It’s all smart marketing, but didn’t go as far yet as greenwashing their world known emblem by turning their red and yellow colours into green and blue.
Among these stacked containers of several levels I saw an art piece as a house looked like it was flying above them. It was quite surreal, because it appeared like it dropped from an American Western movie, and I thought the only thing missing in its absurdity would be some flames to remind us that our house is burning.
We reached the next harbour, where the MS Rotterdam was docked majestically. From there you could already see the skyline with the famous landmark towers of “De Rotterdam” by the architecture office OMA, led by Rem Koolhaas, and the elegant Erasmusbridge by Ben van Berkel of UNStudio. Biking between these skyscrapers we approached our next architectural highlight: The international Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam = AFFR.
The colours of the AFFR programme matched my bike bag perfectly, and we were looking forward to new discoveries on the screens. But for today we had to get to our urban place to find some sleep. Robert had found a cool location, which had even a parking space for our bikes. The Social Hub Rotterdam offered a co-working space, a place to chill and a cool environment for global kids. It was great to mix in there.
We had dinner just on the opposite side of the road at an Indonesian Toko called Smoor.
