Ethansapien sapien to Homo Neanderthalensis

Naturalis
Ethan went to the Naturalis here in Leiden a week ago with Deborah and today I got to go with him.   Spectacular.   This is by far the best natural history museum I've been to and possibly the best science museum overall.

As a kids science museum it blows the NEMO out of the water (har har, see the NEMO looks like a boat on the waterfront in Amsterdam. Blows it out of the water. It's a doubly nautical reference, that's why it's funny...) It's a ton of fun and dense with science.

Lots of those bones the devil put in the rocks to make us question the creation story along with pickled and stuffed specimens less than six thousand years old. They're currently running a special Darwin exhibit.  He would have been 200.  If he had been a sea turtle.  Instead he's dead.  If you hadn't heard.

Like the NEMO, the museum itself is a very nice piece of architecture.  Unlike NEMO, it's not particularly stunning from the outside (not terrible either) but a really remarkably nicely thought out interior.  

Bikes of the day

These cargo bikes were parked outside the museum. They are fairly standard examples of commonly seen cargo bikes. The first is actually a trike, the second a bakfiets. They are both doubly long compared to our base model bakfiets ( a double bak ??) and I imagine when fully loaded with kids, the trike is a lot easier on the upper body.  When not loaded with kids, they can haul a lot of stuff.   

People talk about traditional Dutch bikes with a lot of enthusiasm. I'm not so keen on them.  Traditonal Dutch bikes don't offer any improved functionality over better handling examples from England or Italy, they're just easier to sit on in ergonomically poor positions.  

These cargo bikes are the real gems of the Dutch cycling culture.  You really don't need a car in a country this dense and in fact a car is just a burden to park and maintain.  The biggest version of these bikes offer the hauling capacity of a small pick-up truck.  Sure, you may get where you're going at 10 kph, but in the city you're not going to manage more than 25 kph in a petrol powered truck anyway.  

Perhaps the cargo bikes are not quite as much a piece of the national identity because they are actually not that old in the NL and the Danes were building similar things commonly decades earlier. I'm also quite interested in the mass-produced version by Gazelle.  

Anyway, if you don't currently have a high capacity bike like an xtracycle these are a good option and can now be had in the US either imported or homegrown.  If you already have an xtracycle, it's prbably not worth the cost of switching.  Even starting from scratch, I would consider the xtracycle superior for many, many applications.  Of course, if you have the means, have them all.