What started as an outing against boredom in coronation time has become a mission. Sofie Peters from Vessem and Maud Kokken from Lage Mierde are under the spell of border posts. Since 2019, they have been strolling the Brabant border with Belgium, looking for all one hundred border posts that can be found there. “We have already found 90 border posts. Today we are going for number 91.”
Today the girlfriends are looking for border post 185 in the Plateaux-Hageven nature reserve near Bergeijk. Finding such a pole is not always easy, says Sofie: “Sometimes they are in hard -to -reach places, or on private property. If we really can’t find it, we sometimes ask people we come across. They sometimes look at us strangely and ask: what are you doing?”
During the walking tours, the girls come across everything: from vast nature reserves to historic monuments. “Sometimes you come across really special things, such as the thread from the First World War. We saw the barbed wire and the houses where soldiers were watching and shot people when they crossed the border,” says Maud. “History used to be not my favorite profession, but here along the border it suddenly becomes so tangible,” adds Sofie.
“Are we still going well?” Maud asks as they walk over a forest path. “I think so”, Sofie replies. But the ladies never know for sure: “We don’t know exactly where the border post is exactly, usually it is at a corner point of the border. So it’s always a bit of gambling. That’s really the nice thing about it!”
The ladies carefully capture their adventures. In a thick photo album they collect selfies with the posts found, write down the coordinates and write the date and time of find. Sofie has even written pages with history facts over the border posts.
The fascination for border posts started when Sofie saw an episode of the Omroep Brabant program ‘Merlin across the border’. Not much later she found her first border post during a vacation with her mother. When Corona broke out, it became a safe and fun way to go out with her boyfriend. “When that relationship was over, Maud suggested that you go once and so she became infected with the virus!”
“Sofie, I still think that way is gone!” The girls seem to have taken the wrong turn and staring at the card on their phone. When asked whether the girlfriends never get into a fight while finding the posts, Maud replies: “No, I am always right!” Sofie Geet: “Okay, you are right in that. My sense of direction is really zero, I follow!” explains them. Giggling, the two further into the nature reserve.
Along the way the border post-trackers experience everything. For example, they once came to a remarkable red-white box with a sign that explained that it was a ‘shit pole’: a toilet for soldiers from the Second World War. “Another time we had to deal with a border control and Maud had forgotten her passport!” Sofie Grinnikende.
After walking wrong twice and some mutual discussions about what is really in the right direction, they seem to finally walk on the right path after more than an hour of walking.
On a piece of open heath, Sofie jumps in the air: “Yes! I see him! Yes, we have him!” The border post can be seen in the distance.
Time for the traditional selfie with the post and so the ladies can go to the next border post on their list.
But with only nine posts to go, their hobby almost seems to come to an end. Fortunately, Maud and Sofie have already come up with something new: “After this we go all the streets of Monopoly in the Netherlands!”