Just over the border from Kranenburg in Germany, and a few kilometers away from the Dutch city of Nijmegen, during the summer Himself and I drop in and visit a place that I heard about but hadn’t yet seen.
Back in January, after my operation, the kids visited with our friends and announced that they had seen a roadside vending machine that gives out fresh eggs, and that they had bought some to cook back in the hotel kitchenette for breakfast!
For all the raves this place got you might have thought it was Disneyland, but they were genuinely enthusiastic and loved the ingenious way that this place operated. Over the next months Himself and I went back to Nijmegen many times for followup appointments, but it wasn’t until the last visit this summer that Himself managed to bring me here and show me what all the fuss was about.
The closest we had been previously had been a single fleeting glimpse with the kids yelling “See? Mama did you see it? “… um no I hadn’t seen it, mostly because I was literally looking for a dispenser of some sort on the edge of the road, and not a small shed.
My summer visit revealed a small shed of the type located at the bottom of many a garden, which in turn housed the dispensing machine I had heard rave reviews about.
Naturally this wasn’t the kind of machine that drops the goods from a height into a catcher at the bottom, but one where a sort of turntable reveals small doors that open upon insertion of money and the typing in of the door code.
The long wall of the shed is almost entirely taken up with small shelves where probably several hundred egg cups are displayed, there is even a small basket of fresh eggs with a sign: “Ei kapot ruilen” (Egg broken, trade/replace) so that should you find a broken egg in the box you have just purchased you can replace it with a good one from here. There is also a box to the right of the dispenser for “lege doosjes” (empty boxes) so that egg containers can be recycled again and again.
All in all it’s a brilliant way for tourists and locals to get farm fresh eggs daily without having to pull the farmer away from his business. As testament to the popularity of this place, a car was pulling away as we arrived and new one arrived as I took the photographs, the man used the machine to get two boxes of eggs and didn’t mind that I took a photograph of him doing so.
My children know me well, they were right to get excited about finding something they knew I would really love and appreciate: organic and fresh produce direct to the public and delivered in a quirky and interesting way… Eggcellent!!!