Feb 21st - The Dutch 'Winter Sports Week' Exodus

Another seemingly uninteresting photo perhaps, but one that actually speaks volumes about life in the Netherlands.

The scene is a Shell petrol station and in fact (although my picture isn't wide enough to show this) there are eight cars with Netherlands number plates at every one of the pumps (yellow front plates are NL, as seen in the pic).  In fact, even the cars queuing and those parked, to the side and out of shot had NL plates. 

The significance?  This is a petrol station half way down Germany.

We, along with, what must have been, a large percentage of the Dutch population were fleeing, en masse, from home and taking advantage of the half term break, commonly called (according to Richard's Dutch colleague) 'winter sports week', escaping the country by road, to various ski resorts south of the Netherlands.  We had been warned that every second number plate on the roads would be yellow (German plates are white) and it was true.  Travelling south, we felt as if we were part of a herd, an exodus of Dutch (although we were imposters with NL plates), a mass cultural event.  Driving/crawling along the German autobahn we were surrounded by yellow plates, queuing up at the service station all we could hear were Dutch voices and at our ski resort nearly every single child in the ski school classes was Dutch!