Sponsored Post: All Aboard The Zandvoort Express

For a few years when we were kids we lived in Holland. I was only young but the experience of living abroad means you remember more of that period than many others in your childhood.

Having arrived from the Britain of the Three Day Week, Holland seemed very affluent and the living was good. One of our favourite experiences was to go with our class to a kid sized townscape where we got to drive in miniature cars, (electric) motor bikes and this being Holland, pedal some cycles too. There were traffic lights, one way roads, roundabouts, level crossings, cycle lanes – the works. The teachers had to drag us away at the end of our play session. Except of course it wasn’t play at all, it was a cunning plan by the big people to get us to learn the rules of the road.

So this video for AXA Car Insurance’s I Respect The Road campaign quickly brought this Dutch memory to mind. If you’d dressed the kids in this video in flares, tank-tops and clogs (okay, kidding there – how about Adidas three-stripes?) you would have the perfect recreation of our 70s townscape.

And guess what? Rather than heed the hippy-haired Road Safety chap’s assuredly excellent safety advice, we hared around the ring-roads, pavements and cycle lanes like this was the racetrack at Zandvoort, then home to the Dutch F1 Grand Prix. Just like these kids in fact. Flares or no flares, some things never change.