Hengelo- history and ice-cream.
Trip Start
Jul 20, 2009
1
12
68
Trip End
Sep 06, 2009
Hengelo,
Overijssel,
Netherlands
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
During the war, the Dutch were starving. The cities, like Utrecht, fared worst, and many people travelled to the farming communities on the German border, where things were slightly better. Dad used to tell us the story of when a bomb fell on the zoo. Opa cycled over there and came back with a chunk of the elephant's trunk, which they ate for a week. It was somewhat stringy, I believe.
Anyway, Dad was a thin and skinny thing, in danger of starving to death, so my Oma and Opa cycled all the way to Hengelo from Utrecht, in search of food
Kids and Memorial
. Given that this journey took me nearly two hours in a car, it was no mean feat on a bicycle.Some farming family took pity on Dad and took him in. I don't know how long he stayed or where exactly the farm was, only that it was somewhere near Hengelo. For all I know, it was Sander and Renata's place. I doubt if there is any way of finding out now, either. At the end of his stay, they put him on a bus back to Utrecht and let him find his way home alone. Can you imagine that happening today?
In the interests of history, we explored the small Hengelo museum, which had an unusual cellar full of pickles and a Singer sewing machine. I bought an old photo postcard of the town, then we walked back to the van der Poel ice-cream shop. It claims to have 120 flavours, but we couldn't try them all. We certainly enjoyed the ones we did try.
