Watch Out For . . Feral Chickens?

The sign below was adjacent to the biking path I took to get to the grocery store on Monday, June 20. (There was also a sign that advised those using the path to stay 25 meters away from the cows.)

"Watch out for . . . ."

This was not my first time seeing a "wildrooster" sign, but every time I see one I want to laugh. We saw several in 2008 when a bike trip through portions of the eastern Netherlands took us through a nature reserve area. At that time Google Translate did not exist, so Lon and I wondered if we were being warned about some form of aggressive bird. (After all, we'd had experience with wild turkeys in Minnesota that were very possessive of the bicycle trails in parts of the suburban Twin Cities.) Ah, the danger of the "sounds like" when trying to interpret a foreign language. When we asked Dutch friends Joost and Yolanda about the term, they were highly amused by our interpretation, to say the least. No, there were/are no crazy, rabid chickens inhabiting the Netherlands--only paths and roads with very mundane cattle grates.

We spent a lovely Monday in Nijmegen, a city of just under 200,000 people.  It is said to be the oldest city in the Netherlands, its recognition as a city going back to Roman times. Its position on the large Waal River makes it part of a busy freight transport route. 

The Nijmegen waterfront on the Waal is more utilitarian than
touristy. Most shopping and restaurants are in the center of town

Oldest city it may be, but not a lot of the old Nijmegen still exists. Due to its proximity to the German border, it was the first city in the Netherlands to be captured by the Germans in May 1940. However, it was the events of 1944 and 1945 that caused the most devastation. On February 22, 1944, the city center was heavily damaged when Nijmegen was bombed by American planes whose crews thought they were bombing the German city of Kleve. Several months later, in September 1944, the city was a center of fighting during Operation Market Garden (an Allied military operation intended to establish an invasion route into Germany.) 

Thankfully, the main market square, the Grote Markt, managed to survive the
WWII destruction. The beautiful building to the right is De Waag ("scale"), a Renaissance-era weighing house built in 1612

Sint Stevenskerk was built between the 13th and 15th centuries.
It was heavily damaged during WWII

The Latin School from 1545 stands beside Sint Stevenskerk, and
somehow managed to survive WWII intact

The old town hall (Stadhuis), standing just to the east of the Grote Markt. Mostly
destroyed in WWII, the front portion was left as a burnt-out shell and was
 heavily restored. The current town hall was built just behind this building

Fragments of Nijmegen history preserved in walls of the 
old Stadhuis

A modern shopping street

Market day in the Grote Markt

The Lange Hezelstraat, a more traditional shopping street

The Sint-Nicolaaskapel, is a chapel on the Valkhof hill (in Valkhof Park) in the center of Nijmegen. The current chapel dates from about 1000, and is said to use remains from a palace chapel that Charlemagne
had previously built on the site. Unfortunately for us, we were in Nijmegen on the one day of the
week that the chapel is closed to visitors

Also in Valkhof Park are the Barbarossa ruins, known as St. Maarten's
 Chapel. It is the only remaining remnant of the Valkhof Palace,
built in 1155 by Emperor Frederik Barbarossa. The building fragment
is thought to be the apse of the Imperial Hall, which also served 
as the court chapel

On our ride out of Nijmegen we stopped briefly at a Commonwealth War Cemetery.

The Jonkerbos War Cemetery contains the remains of over 1600
British and Commonwealth servicemen who lost their lives during
the WWII operations in 1944 and 1945

On Tuesday, June 21, we continued our journey down the Maas. It was a pleasant, uneventful cruise, and we stopped for the evening on a floating pontoon ("dock" in America-speak) just after we exited the lock at Lith. We "celebrated" the Summer Solstice by noting that the sun didn't set until about 10 p.m., twilight lingered until at least 11, and it started getting light again before 5 a.m. the next morning.

In Lith we had a front-row seat for the comings and goings from the lock. Most of the recreational 
boats we see are cruisers, or other small boats, and we are large compared to them. But next to
a container barge we are itty-bitty 

Yesterday we turned off the Maas onto the Maxima Canal on our way to 's-Hertogenbosch, familiarly known as Den Bosch. We're on a quay quite near to the city center and plan to be here for 3 nights.