During the summer of 2004, I spent three weeks travelling through the Baltic states and Scandinavia. It was one of the highlights of my life thus far, not in the least because I could tick off several boxes of my should-do-once list: visiting the former Soviet Union, experiencing midnight sun, sleeping on night trains.

Upon coming back home, I started to plan my next holidays, during which I was going to travel through central and eastern Europe. Several times I went to the local bookshop, to browse the Lonely Planet to Eastern Europe — the one with the men playing chess in a pool on the front cover — and to make plans in my head.

Life had different plans with me though and these didn’t involve spending summers on my own. Many times did I resist the different path life was taking, even if I had chosen that path myself, but ultimately I was and still am very happy with the way things went.

This week we spent in Budapest. I had the best time of my life. Not because of the things I could check off my lists — although there were some of these too — but because we stayed in an awesome hotel in a great city, met great people, didn’t feel like we had to do anything and everything was just right.

On Thursday, the day before we flew back home, we spent several hours in the Széchenyi thermal bath. Just before we left I saw a few men playing chess in one of the pools. At the exact same place as the men on the Lonely Planet guide.

The world is such a great place.

In one of my earliest childhood memories, I am riding my tricycle through our living room. In the background, my dad is concentratedly watching the Tour de France on TV; or he would have been if it hadn’t been for me constantly shouting “Tour de France! Tourtourtour!” at the top of my lungs.

The Tour de France, in case you don’t know, is the world’s biggest cycling race, where about 200 riders spend three weeks in July riding 200km a day through France and occasionally its surrounding countries. I was a massive Tour de France fan as a child and spent many hours in my room, reading books about the history of the race and, especially, studying long lists of results.

Of course, like any Dutch boy, I also fantasised about riding the Tour myself, ignoring the fact that even then I knew how I lacked any kind of talent for any kind of sport. In those dreams the Tour, which had visited the Netherlands just a handful of times, always passed through the area where I lived. They were dreams after all.

Yesterday, the 97th Tour de France started. In Rotterdam, a few yards from the hospital I was born in. That is a nice little fact. Today, however, the first proper stage passed through the town I grew up in; the route included many roads that I’ve rode on thousands of times, including most of my daily route from home to school. That is still a bit surreal.