Borderlands are always interesting. Take the heart of Brabant, for example. You are barely half an hour on the road or look, there you have another village with a neo-Gothic church of disproportionate dimensions. At the right moment you lose count and the big question is on the table: are those people from Brabant such churchgoers or what is that?

Until you realize: this was the border between the Protestant north and the Catholic south. When the latter was allowed to show itself again in the middle of the nineteenth century thanks to Thorbecke, the Romanists thought: 'We will teach those Protestants a lesson!' Whereupon they replaced their humble barn churches with these kind of grand palaces.

Second thing that stands out. Somewhere in the direction of Sprang-Capelle, you are halfway there, the landscape changes from intimate, wooded and small-scale to open, light and spacious. Where you used to drive on poplar avenues, you now end up on dead straight stripes of asphalt and, yes, real dikes that you have to get down on. In other words: from the sandy soils of Brabant you have ended up in the river country and Brabant also benefits from this.

The adventure begins in Vught, a charming village, actually more of a sprawling residential area with an old heart where you can score your first St. Peter. It is now used as a library, so in Vught they don't take it too closely with religion. Ironic: it is precisely in this lavishly rich environment that the EBI, the Extra Secure Institution, is located a stone's throw from the Iron Man. With a little bit of weather, Mohammed Bouyeri and Willem Holleeder hear the cheerful voices of thousands of bathers. Also a punishment.

Maria
Through the woods you head to Helvoirt where your image of Catholic Brabant is further adjusted. In the shadow of the Sint-Nicolaaskerk, Marty van de Loo runs his fruit and vegetable shop. Or does he know where you can find the Maria cave? 'Eh … I know Maria's cave', he laughs, 'but the Maria cave … no.' With a bowl of freshly picked strawberries to take home, you will drive off in the direction of Boxtel where you will marvel at classic cars in the Classic Park. On the way there, the woods make way for a small-scale scenic landscape with the spire of, yes, another huge church on the horizon.

Now, of course, nothing beats a nice popping Douglas from 1925, a Nimbus with open valve lifters or a sixties Puch with such a horny red taillight. But classic cars can also count on our sympathy, especially those from the 1950s when the world still had a future. Deeply happy you are staring at a mint green 1956 Cadillac Series 62 – it will never get better. Also seen: a T-Ford so coquettish, with that butt, the cabin, that nose and then, to top it off, a sun visor above the windscreen. This isn't about speed. This is about beauty.

Via Pastoor Mandersstraat and Deken Frankenstraat and Kapelaan Huyberslaan – yes, those boys once counted – you can whiz to the Markt of beautiful Oirschot. There you can enjoy a sausage roll, under the sound of St. Peter's Basilica around noon. The biggest surprise awaits outside the town when you drive into the woods to visit the Chapel of the Holy Oak there, on the Proosbroekweg. A real place of pilgrimage and it shows. It is full of elderly people from Brabant who, on a sunny day, rode there on their electric bicycles to catch up with other elderly couples. Under the trees there is a muffled buzz, supplemented by the hesitant song of birds that have just returned from Africa.

Shit
Towards Oisterwijk, the woods make way for the openness of quiet farmland. That means chugging along on the Brandsbeemdseweg and the Broekstraat and the Langendonksedijk and, … er, but wait a minute. What is there to read? B&B Boertel & Welness Suite De Meander, located on the grounds of a dairy farm. Followed a little later by Bij Ons, Boerderijterras and Zichtstal, also a dairy farm, with, according to the website, 'a beautiful view of the green nature reserve' along the Beerze. That's how you do it, influence public opinion by playing nice weather, while it is the same intensive livestock farms that threaten all those beautiful, green natural areas. Boertel – after much thought you understand that this is a hotel on an intensive livestock farm. And Wellness Suite… just ask the cows that are allowed to stay inside year after year, with their feet in shit.

Of course you drive around De Lind, that striking heart of Oisterwijk, with its pruning trees in the middle and the dozens of terraces along it. But hip Oisterwijk nowadays gathers on the other side of the railway. Until 2000, one of the largest leather factories in Europe, the Royal United Leather KVL, was located there. Now the former factory buildings house institutions such as EKWC, the European Ceramic Work Center, a hotel and Robèrt van Beckhoven, yes indeed, that of the TV program Heel Holland Bakt. But we are especially interested in the steam engine that once supplied the factory and half of Oisterwijk with electricity. A colossal device, consisting of two horizontal cylinders, meters long, and a huge flywheel, good for 800 kVA. A beautiful piece of industrial heritage.

When you approach Waalwijk and Drunen at three o'clock, change is in the air. You can feel the hot breath of the Randstad here, with all that traffic on the A59 and the extensive industrial estates. There is even an exit Drunen-Noord and a Kastanjelaan-West – how do you come up with it? Once above the A59, peace returns and you can surrender to the delights of the river country, which of course means docking over the dike. But before you do that, you could take a look at the Wolfsburg – museum for air-cooled Volkswagens, at 9 Perzikstraat in Wijk en Aalburg.

glasses
It is the life's work of livestock farmer André van Wijlen, who had already been ruined at home because his parents drove a Beetle, just like that of his wife Antoinette, with equally fatal consequences. And Antoinette, she runs the museum, remembers well the first time André came to pick her up, in a Beetle of course, after which love was inevitable. Their collection now includes a few dozen VWs, from the glasses with its two rear windows to the oval and from an original fire truck to the ultimate among VW aficionados, a VW Cabriolet in Hebmüller-Karosserie – mouth-watering. A sign of their love: the museum has a facade in which you can recognize the contours of the old VW logo, a castle!

(Text: Promoter 04, June 17, 2021)