Utrecht; Friday, 07 August, 2020

In the original version of this plan I’d work until the end of the day, have a leisurely trip down to Gatwick and get the evening flight across to Amsterdam. Then the virus came along and over the space of a three week period my flights changed eight times. So instead I’d booked a half day off work and shortly after powering down my laptop I was in a cab and on my way over to Heathrow.

I had a quick and painless journey through the airport, which was noticeably busier than it had been just two weeks earlier on my way out to Chania. A smooth flight and a very long taxi from the very distant runway at Schiphol later and I was back in the Netherlands. If Heathrow had been returning to its normal levels of business, the same couldn’t be said for an almost deserted Schiphol. Whilst most things were open there were very few people around, and for once I only just beat my bag back to the luggage carousel.

Luggage collected I headed over to the station and just managed to miss the train over to Utrecht, but thankfully there’s a pretty good frequency of service so not long after I was on a train and on my way.

After arriving at the Centraal station I headed over to my hotel to checkin and drop my stuff off before heading on into town to have a look round.

My first stop was to the centre of the old town and the old canal or Oudegracht which runs through the heart of it. I had a wander along the banks of the canal as it meanders its way through the old town, stopping off for a very nice ice-cream and then an early dinner in one of the many restaurants that line the banks of the canals.

Dinner completed I continued my walk down as far as the Cathedral and what at the time of visiting was one of Europe’s most impressive mounds of scaffolding – the Cathedral tower, which is one of the signature sights of the city, was undergoing major renovation and the tallest church tower in the Netherlands was also the tallest scaffolding tower.

I had a wander around the Cathedral area before heading back across the canal and over into the old town, wandering through some of the back streets until I reached the modern shopping centre and the mass of roadworks around it.

When the shopping centre was originally built the car was all the rage and a chunk of canal had been filled in and turned into a main road through the centre of town. Now, 40 years later most of those changes have been rolled back and toady the replacement shopping centre sits above a freshly revived canal and a road junction that’s being restored back to public transport, bike and pedestrian friendly.

I took some photos of the restored canal with the last light of the sun, before walking the short distance back to my hotel and my beautifully chilled room to turn in for the night.