Utrecht 2024

Another year, another visit to the old colleagues in Utrecht and a nice opportunity to lock myself up in a hotel room to make some noise. Unfortunately, my default hotel in Utrecht seems to have two parts.. a more modern front side which has all the amenities like air conditioning, but it’s a bit noisy, because of people gathering in front of the KFC downstairs. The back part is a lot quieter, because it opens up to a back yard shared with a couple of apartments, but those rooms don’t have air conditioning and with the humid heat this summer, the stay was slightly strenuous.

But, I got away from everyday chores at home, had a nice dinner with the folks and even got some music done 🙂

In addition to that, I finally got to see the Domtoren without the scaffolding, it’s been in for the whole time I lived in Utrecht and I made a nice day trip to Rotterdam to visit the Dutch Pinball Museum, which was great. You don’t get to see many pinball machines these days in the first place, but the thing I hate about them is that you hardly get to see much of the game, because your quarter is long gone before you got anywhere. 🙂

At pinball museums, the machines are usually in free play mode, so you get to play as long as you want(or the queue behind you lets you) and you can actually make some progress and experience the great story-telling in many of these games. And the multiple storeys at the museum in Rotterdam were even greater than the smaller venue we visited in Amersfoort last year.. The number of machines seemed similar to the museum in Schwerin, Germany, but the selection was slightly better.. I basically got to play the real-world version of every machine I own in the Pinball FX3 game.

And of course, I did a little walking around in Rotterdam, which I never got around to while living in Utrecht.. I did visit Rotterdam by velomobile, but I never really explored much beyond the cube houses and the “Buttplug gnome”. Something I always found a bit unfortunate, because my initial plan was to move to Rotterdam and I “ended up” in Utrecht, which proved to be unexpectedly great.

Due to the heat, I spent most of the time in my hotel room, enjoying the quiet and learning the ins and outs of some of my music equipment, though.