Park and Ride, Netherlands

This is the park and ride at Venlo station, and unlike ones here is for bikes. It’s well used. The Dutch are laid back bike users; people ride ordinary bikes in ordinary clothes at all ages without helmets and have a great network of cycle paths. We had a look around the town and then set off for Germany and the Rheinland Palatinate area. We wanted to go to Burg Trifels by Annweiler am Trifels the following day; a place we had almost visited previously. We ended up at Bockenheim an der Weinstraße, where we stayed at a vineyard; we had a chat with some Dutch people who told us there was a lot of snow in the Alps down to 1500 metres or lower. That caused us a bit of concern as we were planning to go hut to hut walking in Austria starting at 2000 metres.