Klein Amerika

Groesbeek is in a weird part of the Netherlands.  It is actually pretty hilly.  What I didn't realize, until we saw a scale representation of the area, is that it is the only hilly part in the middle of the flat, flat Netherlands landscape.  When you look at the 3-D map it is all flat, then a giant (relatively speaking) mound of hills, and then more flatness.  It is very odd looking.  In the walk to the cemetery, which was through a fairly rural area, you almost would have thought that you were near Lynchburg.

Rolly hills, trees turning colors, corn stubble, it all felt very familiar and, since it was pretty cloudy, you couldn't really tell that there weren't mountains in the background

And weird, pretty clouds.  And cows.

And deer.  The guys I was walking with thought that these were White-Tail deer but I am not convinced.  I think that look more like Fallow deer which 1) look like this and 2) are much more common in the Netherlands than White-Tails.

Now, it is quite possible that White-Tail deer populations in the Netherlands/in captivity/in other varieties of circumstances of which I am not aware could look different than I am used to, so these might still be them. These are pictures from the internet of the two kinds of deer.  And, acknowledging that my photo quality is not so great, I think that they definitely look more like Fallow Deer.

Fallow Deer growing antlers

Young White-Tail with spots

Interestingly enough, this part of the Netherlands is called Klein Amerika particularly because of its different landscapes.  Since it was hilly and forested, instead of building dikes and creating little narrow fields delineated by canals, the Dutch cleared the forests and had wider, squarer fields more like what you would see in the U.S.  They equated this type of land usage with U.S. Manifest Destiny and so they called the area Klein Amerika--Little America.

This, for instance, is a Google Maps satellite picture of what the fields look like a few miles east of Rotterdam (and over most of the rest of the Netherlands).  Notice the little marker on the bottom of the picture that shows the scale.  All of these strips are separated by canals (often instead of fences) and most of the them are just a couple-three dozen feet wide.  Can you imagine trying to turn a tractor with a baler and a hay wagon on these little fields?  And if you guess wrong, you end up in a pretty wet ditch.

This, on the other hand, is the way the fields look around Groesbeek.  I left this one a little further out so that you can see just how close to the German border we (and those Allied Paratroopers) were.  The fields are still pretty small but they are much more convenient looking and, notice, there are also bits of forest.

There is a joke that, during the War, a German soldier got lost going through the area around Groesbeek and stopped to ask directions from a farmer.
"Where am I?" he asked.
"Little America," answered the farmer.
"Oh," said the German "I thought we had to go through England to get there."

It was a pretty fun day.  On the way back to Rotterdam, a bunch of us stopped at Nijmegen for some supper, which was fun.  We met at the train station at 7:15 am and we ended up getting back into Rotterdam around 10 pm (We were a little delayed on the way back because of mechanical difficulties with the train and because of a general slow-down that resulted from someone jumping in front of a train near Den Haag) but it was quite a fun excursie.  The train ticket was kind of expensive so I figured that I probably wouldn't go back to see the museum at Arnhem or the other things I had thought of seeing in Nijmegen but now I think it might be worth it after all, especially if I have to go to Utrecht to do research anyways.