Everybody has heard of Vincent Van Gogh. Arguably, he is one of the best known artists of all time. Everybody recognizes “Starry Night.” Everybody knows that he cut off his ear. Art lovers worldwide know that he was from the Netherlands, and his influence is seen abundantly through his beautiful home country. Even casual art enthusiasts are familiar with his paintings. The more devoted may have seen some of the many museums that house his work—the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam or the Musee d’Orsay in Paris in particular. True art lovers may even have traveled to Arles in the south of France to see what inspired him to produce some of his best-known paintings. But only the most dedicated fans know about the Van Gogh Bike Path. What??? Yes, bike path. As in, a path for bicycles. Yep; it’s six hundred meters of sidewalk art that glows in the dark thanks to the solar effect on thousands of stones arranged on the path in a nod to Van Gogh’s famous Starry Night painting. How is it that you’ve never heard of it? Lucky for you, I was just riding on the Van Gogh-Roosegaarde cycle bike path with a friend and can tell you all about it.
Picture it: After a long, but wonderful, day exploring the Netherlands, we pull into our final destination, the Landgoed De Grote Beek B&B in Eindhoven. (It turns out that our hotel is actually a mental hospital but that’s a different story.) We get situated, wait for the sky to darken and proceed to rent bikes from the front desk. Not only are we going to see the Van Gogh Bike Path, but we’re going to ride on it as intended with our dark bikes gliding over its glowing surface. It was when we picked up the bikes that things got a little dicey. I’m a very casual (that is rare) bike rider, but it doesn’t matter that I never ride in the dark and it’s been DECADES since we had ridden bikes without hand brakes. It doesn’t matter that we are about to ride through a city that we’ve never been to. We are here to ride the Van Gogh Bike Path in the dark, as the artist intended! What does matter, though, is that we are hungry, and a girl’s got to eat! Our first stop was the center of Eindhoven to find sustenance. It added a bit of time to our journey, but that’s okay! The train station had a lot of activity going on, but we were too cheap to by a train ticket so we could access the restaurants beyond the turnstile. Luckily we found a doner restaurant willing to serve us even though it was past closing time. With our bellies full, we proceeded to the bike path.
The ride to the actual path was quite the adventure: following the GPS on our phones; being passed by much younger and more bike savvy riders; dragging our feet when we forgot how to use the pedals as brakes at the stoplights; being sidetracked (squirrel!) by some of the best graffiti art we have ever seen (and promising ourselves to pay it a proper visit the following day). I won’t even mention what happened when I came across the curb that was a little bit too high…. We finally arrived at the Van Gogh-Roosengaarde cycle path. It was six hundred meters of visual splendor that made us forget about every trial on the way there. Artist Daan Roosegaarde did an amazing job designing the stones on the path as they create an incomparable experience. Riding the path was an unforgettable opportunity. Sadly, our pictures don’t begin to do the path justice. There is absolutely no comparison between our dim photos and the brilliance of the path in reality.
