Amsterdam

Waiting to check into our hotel we wandered the streets a little.

For tonight, Dee wanted to take us to one of her favorite restaurants in Amsterdam for dinner.

We decided to walk there and back. As a ‘running’ joke, every time we crossed a canal we took a ‘selfie.’ There were way too many to post!

Dinner itself was interesting and fun and amazing. Great pick!

https://www.veganees.com/

Our excursion today on the way back to Amsterdam was the De Haar Castle. This is the largest castle in the Netherlands with a long and later surprising modern history involving the Rothchilds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Haar_Castle

Dinner tonight, another Rijstafel in the town of Arnhem.

Yes, it is that good!

Our afternoon was spent walking around this big and absolutely fascinating open air museum.

In the nearly three hours we spent there, we only saw parts of it. It was interesting and all very well done.

https://www.openluchtmuseum.nl/

We went with Tijn to visit the town of Ravenstein while Dee went back to Schiphol to pick up the rest of the gang.

Arriving there, we expected to see a charming historic town with shops and cafes. We found a ghost town with not a soul in sight. It is Monday, and everything was closed.

After a short walk through the quiet and empty streets, we changed plans and headed off to the Brabant woods.

Finally found something warm to drink: the most unusual ‘tea’. Mine was some ginger pieces in hot water, and Kenn’s was a mint branch in hot water. This will be our new way of drinking it from now on!

Everyone knows that boating makes you hungry, right?

We headed to the historic city Utrecht and after a wander through the town, headed to the restaurant to have our first Indonesian Rijstafel.

Legend goes that when the Dutch East India Company started importing spices it was fairly unknown. Some chefs came over from Indonesia and started promoting the spices by presenting little sample tastes and plates.

This is a unique Dutch experience

If you think about it, this amazing dinner started as a company chef sales pitch!

We rented a boat and had a wonderful afternoon on the Vecht river.

Not only is it a most relaxing way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but you also get to see things from a different angle.

We started our morning with a ‘treasure hunt’ around the town of Megen.

We went looking for an artist’s geocaching project where she hid caches all around the town. If you mark where you found all of them, not only will you have done the outline of a mouse on the map, but you also get clues to more locations.

It was a fun and exciting way to see all these pastoral scenes around the town.

And we ended up finding 5 of the 6 we set out to find…!

We will be staying in the beautiful home of friends in the small town of Megen for the next few days.

With a sigh of relief we were finally able to take those compression socks off and get more comfortable.

We had a relaxing afternoon sitting and talking in the ‘garden’, and then took a walk through town to get some ice cream.

Megen, as small as it is, has a long history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megen) and still has two active cloisters. One for the nuns, and one for the monks.

After the best lemon-and-basil ice cream we ever had, the fast approaching thunderstorm cut short our further exploration with a mad dash through the streets.

More exploring tomorrow…

On our way to the house we stopped for a quick liquid refreshment and to see the beautiful little town of Zaltbommel on the bank of the Waal.

This small town’s most famous inhabitant was Mr. Phillips, the founder of the Phillips electronics company. This is the same company Pieter’s dad used to work for!

The town was very picturesque and many years ago an artist came and created ‘Gutter Ghosts’. These are not gargoyles, but rather creatures that peek out of gutters and around drains. There are about 30 of them scattered theough the town. Each one also has something about the place where they ‘hang out’. For example, the one above the bookstore would be reading, and the one above the optometrist have glasses. My favorite was the one above the restaurant that was holding a knife and fork, but from the street looks like Yoda playing drums!

Gutter Ghost Route – ‘Ghosts’ hang in many gutters or on the facades of buildings and houses in Zaltbommel, created by the regional visual artist Joris Baudoin. The artwork tells something about the people who live or lived there or the shop that is located there.