Postcard 9 - Presentation 'Once when I was in...' - 'Zeeland'

Dear John,

Do you remember my letters I used to send you during holidays ten, fifteen years ago? We always went on holiday to the Dutch ‘Veluwe’ during summer and because I felt very bored I wrote you piles of letters. And I think you still know the content: ‘We are back on the Veluwe and we have a nice holiday house. Our beds are a little bit soft and today we cycled 20 kilometres. This evening we’re going to swim.’ Two weeks, day after day, I wrote you this or a suchlike letter.

My holidays at the Veluwe were boring, most of the time. Making walks, going shopping, swimming, cycling… it was simply not my cup of tea. When we were cycling in the forests, my sister and I started singing ‘A tall tree, a small tree, a tall tree, a small tree, tree, tree…’, to my parents’ great annoyance. They loved it to be two or three weeks in their favourite holiday home, doing all the boring things I just wrote down.

Last week, I heard Maud’s story about her vacations in Zeeland, one of the Dutch provinces. Zeeland is the province with lots of water and sunny beaches and it is a very attractive place to be for many Germans. But little Maud thought it was awful to go there on holiday: she hated everything, while her family loved everything… I felt very sorry for her, because I know really well what she was talking about, because of my own awful experiences on the Veluwe, between the small and tall trees, trees, trees.

But fortunately, both Maud’s and my story have a happy end. Maud went to France later on and started to love camping on mini-campings or camping at a farm. I went to Germany and its Black Forest and started to understand how nice holidays could be. And to show you I am really widely orientated: next summer I will go to England and Austria in a period of five weeks. So, I have really overgrown my Veluwe nightmare in the past years. But I still hope that there are few trees in these countries…

All the best,
Neline