Excitement over an oak
Kabouter had to read a book for school, and he chose a book whose main character is an oak.
Hmm, I was a little in doubt when I heard that, that he'd like it. It's not the style of books he tends to choose but somehow he loved the book about an oak.
It turns out that the oak is a real oak and that it's famous in the Netherlands. I learned it is now squeezed in the middle of a highway and risks getting cut down for enlargement of that highway...all of that while in the past it was part of a historic domain. We googled but I could only find facebookpages, petitions and the news that the decision to cut it down was final but it dates from 2019-2020 and I found nowhere confirmation that this famous tree had indeed already been taken down.
Now he must prepare an exposition/ lecture about the book, so we were in the midst of brainstorms.
And then I had to drive to Utrecht for work last week for a regional meeting and I'm doing my long solitary drive on Monday morning when I spot a nice tree near Breda and Oosterhout.
What a big tree, with a little fence around it
... in the middle of the highway.
WAIT, what? Which highway am I on? The A58...
What, wait!!! That's THE tree, the tree from the book. I had just driven by the tree from the book! The tree was still there.
You can't believe how hyped I was for that discovery. So when I arrived in the office in Utrecht, my colleagues ask me if I had a good drive, and I am still so hyped, that I start talking about this famous tree, that is the main character of a book and that is going to be cut down but that I drove by it and I was so excited etc and I wanted to take a picture!
Well the tree isn't that famous either because my both Dutch colleagues had never heard of this tree but everybody felt my enthusiasm right away so my boss was already googling the site and realizing together with me that there's no way that I could take a safe picture from the highway but that the nearby bridge would be a perfect spot. Immediately they gave me an itinerary as if I wouldn't have figured that out on my gps. Anyway...fun to share the excitement for an oak.
And the next day our regional meeting had a deadline to end on time since I had an official objective to go and take a picture of an oak in daylight. And everyone wanted copies of those pictures. And so I found myself at 6PM on a bridge across the A58 highway in Southern Netherlands, taking pictures from different angles from a historic oak, stuck in the middle of the highway.
A local farmer biked by. "Hey you are not going to cut our tree, are you?" "Nope, I came to photograph it". He laughs and waves back when he moves on. As I head back to the car, I send some pictures to Kabouter and the same pictures to a Microsoft Team's chat that received immediately some Yeay's and hearts from Danish, Scottish and Dutch colleagues. And while driving home, I thought that was cute...look at all of us getting so cutely excited over a tree. I'm sure I'll get updates now from my boss whenever she drives to the Belgian office, whether she has seen the tree or not.
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