Last week I returned back to Belfast after a whirlwind roadtrip adventure with my friends and former colleagues, Elodie and Lisanne. During our trip, while passing from the Netherlands to Belgium to Germany to Luxembourg in one day, we stopped at Vaalersberg, a small mountain in a forested park, home to the famous Three Countries Point.
The photo above is of the borders between Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium.
Our visit to this tourist attraction was hilarious. We parked (somewhat illegally) in a parking lot we believed to be just beside a small memorial plaque to the borders. What we found was that when the German hiking family joked with us about it being an hour away, it was a very subtle joke, as it took us nearly an hour to reach the main attraction, which we had very little awareness of.
Of course we didn't think to bring money to ride to elevator to the top of a look out (because who knew that was there) and of course I fell down on our walk back to the car because I was woefully unprepared for any type of forest trails...
The experience itself, standing across three countries, is somewhat hard to describe. Because it didn't actually feel like anything. The small children laughing playfully as they jumped from one country to the next were precious, but for me the experience presented a difficult reality to wrap my mind around.
Again I'm left pondering borders - abstract and exact; metaphorical and literal; imagined and physical. Amidst the ruins of battlefields where so many have fought and died lives this stone in the ground as evidence that the boundaries that divide (and connect) us all, are only as meaningful as we make them.
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