Planned a route in fairly intricate detail. Decided to go all the way back to Utrecht tonight, and then perhaps drive around during the weekend more with Kim. The route involved driving up the Mosel, then cutting up to Aachen, then over near Dusseldorf to join the autobahn, then staying in Germany so as to avoid speed limits as long as possible before heading into the Netherlands. Wrote this route out in just the right amount of detail on a piece of paper, with different kinds of roads marked, city names written down in the right places, all done stylistically so that I could figure it out at a glance while driving.
It was a really good plan. Things went wrong when I missed a turn and left the Mosel a little earlier than planned. That was all right, though, because I would meet up with the correct road soon enough. Then I got caught in a trap (in theory, a town) called "Ulmen." I took 421 to Ulm, and very simply lost it somewhere. I spent about half an hour trying to find it again, but Ulmen kept spitting me out on the south side headed either for A48 (an autobahn) or on 259 headed back to Cochem--a town on the Mosel that I had already gone through, and as beautiful as it was, I didn't feel any great need to return to. (It made me wonder if the Mosel was really the Withywindle...)
I decided that I had had enough of twisty country roads and was ready for the autobahn again (if you can't beat 'em, join 'em) and took the A48 back nearly to Koblenz before heading north on the A61 and just following the signs to Eindhoven without worrying about what country I was in.
Interestingly enough, the lack of a speed limit on a few small sections of the autobahn here and there (really rather uncommon; in two days I probably spent between 20 and 30 minutes total going 100mph) did not make travel faster. When I got into the Netherlands, where motorway car speed limits are 120 kph, my average speed (as calculated by the cute computer in the car) went up by about 6 mph; gas mileage went up just a trifle, and traffic smoothed out. I'm still glad that there are sections of the autobahn without speed limits--it was very much fun to go 100 mph and I hope to go back when I have finished the break-in period and can go faster--but it doesn't seem to have a significant effect on overall speed during a journey. This analysis is, of course, based on one sample with no controls, so it's entirely possible that it is completely and utterly wrong, but it was still interesting to see on an anecdotal basis.
[later: It was a fluke. Traffic on highways in The Netherlands seems normally to be rather heavy and dominated by trucks going 80 kph (~50mph) and on average much slower than in Germany.]
After I got back, Kim and I ate a small supper and then went for a drive together. We found the local zoo and then drove through the countryside for a while in order to wait for traffic into Utrecht to subside. We rather hoped that by 8 pm incoming traffic would be light, but that was not the case.
As we pulled up, we saw some fellow students going to a "borrel" (apparently there is no exact translation for this Dutch word) and so offered them a ride, which they bravely accepted. Discovered when we arrived that the borrels are not being held for a few weeks because of easter, so we took a walk in the nearby park instead. In the meantime, I got plenty of practice parking in European-sized parking spaces. If all four wheel could rotate 90 degrees and I could drive sideways into the slot, that would be nice. :-)
Finally, time to answer some email and get some sleep.