Visitors rush to Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and after they stay there for several days they might even try Delft and The Hague, but there is so much more to this welcoming and generally flat nation.

I decided I wanted to see something else of this country, so I headed south of Rotterdam. I was enjoying myself so much that I did not see that the road I was on on the map ran out at the hamlet of Kop van t’ Land. I was just about to turn around when I thought, no, I’ll wait for that little tiny ferry I can just about see to inch its way back over the Nieuwe Merwede river, and then I shall put my car on that and see what is on the other side.

Only two cars and two bicycles got on. What I found on the other side was the marsh of Die Biesbosch, beloved by bird watchers and countryside lovers. Intoxicating were the long, thin, straight Dutch roads through avenues of poplars and the subtle but invigorating rolling of the countryside that is broken once in a while by a windmill.

I soon reached ‘s-Hertogenbosch, a town famous for its small system of canals, neat houses and restaurants, impressive Sint-Janskathedraal (St. John’s) Cathedral and being the birthplace and workshop of that Medieval portrayer of the woes of Purgatory, Hieronymus Bosch. In 1463, the artist witnessed a devastating fire in Den Bosch (as it is known and much easier to say) that destroyed it and might have led to his expanding on his choice of subject matter. For lunch I ate traditional raw herring, holding the salted fish by the tail and eating it from the head down with a spoonful of diced onion.

My next stop was the enclave of Baarle-Hertog . It is a piece of Belgium completely surrounded by the Netherlands. I adore visiting these geographical oddities, and obsessed travelers no doubt will love this place, too. It is small, with some interesting architecture and two or three bars with outdoor seating. Much is made of the strange nature of this place, and a broken line goes right through the middle of one restaurant, so that it is possible to have your coffee in the Netherlands and your croissants in Belgium (or would that be better, gastronomically, the other way around?).

Actually, to say that this Belgian village is completely surrounded is not true. Within the main section of this enclave are six pieces of the Netherlands, while its other main chunk also has one Dutch piece in it; then again, there are 14 minute pieces of Belgium also dotted amid the Dutch soil, which collectively is called Baarle-Nassau. Residents pay taxes dependent on where their front door is, so rumors state, so the position of doors constantly is changing from town to town without actually changing house. Some houses have a front door in one country and a back door in the other. Or half the front door in one and…well, you get the picture. This all came about following years of regional warfare and the 1843 Treaty of Maastricht, which attempted to resolve all that and that secured the boundaries of the Netherlands and Belgium following Belgian independence from its neighbor in 1831. A further attempt was made in 1875 to settle the issue of this fractional enclave, but the governments of the two countries refused to recognize any findings; in 1996, one more attempt was made, but by then everyone realized that it was better to let the tourists revel in the joyousness of weirdness.

One more wonderful find—back in the Netherlands, but very close to Belgium—was the small town of Wouw, which I stopped at solely because I like the look of its name on a road sign. I soon found out that the name does not rhyme with “wow,” but I glad I discovered it nonetheless. It has a neat central, grassy square with a white restaurant at one end and a huge church that appears much larger if viewed from its cobbled entry lane of trees. A local spoke to me of the German bombing it received at the end of World War II. “That building went, as did that one, and that one over there. Also that one, too,” he said, as though everyone in town knew of every atrocity suffered by it.

In Wouw, I particularly liked a frieze of Noah’s Arc atop one house. One building rebuilt since those dark war days once was a brewery, and today a sculpture of a swan holding in its beak a gold star (the former brewery’s symbol) graces the roof. A line of old bottles found on the site has been plastered into its wall.
To get back to Rotterdam, I drove from the Dutch province of Noord Brabant to its cousin of Zeeland, which is the classic Netherlands of polders, dykes, flat fields, lazy estuaries and old-fashioned windmills. Thin roads divide fields reclaimed from the sea, and villages dot the only hillocks, such settlements as Sint Maartensdijk, Sint Annaland and Sint Philipsland. You can see for miles. Global warming could wipe all these islands off the map, you feel. I ended up at a pretty village called Stellendam. Graceful cottages surround a windmill, and Europe’s largest container port at Hook of Holland rears up in the distance. Another wonderful road trip.