The Netherlands 2012

I am now ready to post about our amazing trip to the Netherlands.  I may or may not have misplaced the thumb drive with all our pictures on it. If I did misplace it that would be a good explanation for the delay.  ;)  Just a slight warning, this is a long post.  I'm a stickler when it comes to chronological order and if I did this in more than one post than the last stuff would be first and the first stuff would be last and I really don't like that.  But feel free to just peruse the pictures if you'd like or read it in more than one sitting. This is as much for our family as for any of the two other people that read my blog so you'll just have to take the details in stride.

Thursday, April 19
Today was travel day.  Our flight left SLC at 11:30am and we arrived in Portland at 2:30pm.  We had just enough time to catch our connecting flight and we were off. We flew up over the North Pole and after a LONG, sleepless 10 hours we landed in Amsterdam on Friday morning at 8:30.  The Netherlands are 8 hours ahead of us so when we landed our bodies were still thinking it was the middle of the night. Our excitement was fueling us so we didn't feel very sluggish that first day.
My very first stroll through a foreign city.  I was in heaven.

Since we landed in Amsterdam we thought we'd spend this day seeing the sights. No not those sights. (wink, wink) Although Amsterdam is famous for it's Red Light district we did not indulge in sight seeing there. But it is pretty impossible to bypass "coffee shops." A.K.A. marijuana shops. They are pretty much on every street.

It was cold our first few days here with plenty of rain to keep the cobblestone wet and the plants happy.  Just a warning here: remember I was a guest on this "work" trip so there are a lot of garden pictures.  That's what the men came for but I was never disappointed.  

Our first garden stop, Amsterdam's Botanical Garden.  It was very small and fairly formal (and cold).

This is the oldest potted plant on record in the world.

They say this tree has been in a container for something like 400 years. I am not making this up. 

Holland is also known for it's many famous artists, mostly painters.  Their two most famous, Rembrandt and Van Gogh.
They have two amazing museums right across from each other in the Museum Plein.  (Plein means park)
Rembrandts works are housed here in the Rijks Museum. Unfortunately, this was being renovated (of course) so we didn't get to go inside.

But we did walk right by Rembrandts house. It's the one with the green shutters and all the people outside. 

 

We did get to go inside the Van Gogh Museum. I wasn't terribly excited about this at first because I wasn't a huge fan of Van Gogh's work but I am so glad we waited in the 40 min. line to get in. Yep, it was that crowded. (That's me in the striped hat in the bottom right corner.)

 

The museum was amazing. There is just something about seeing original works of art that can take your breath away. This museum housed 200 of Van Gogh's original works and many others of his contemporaries and artists that he admired or worked with through his years. This one was my favorite.  It's called Garden with Courting Couples. I bought a print of this one to give to my mom who has become quite an avid painter these days.

   

This picture doesn't do it justice.  You couldn't take pictures inside the museum so I just copied this one from online.

We made our way to the city of Leiden (pronounced Liden) after our tour of Amsterdam. It was a lovely town.  It was also a college town so there were lots of college students everywhere.  Here in Leiden I saw my very first windmill of the trip. 

 I was so excited! You'd think you'd see more windmills in this country but there really aren't a lot left.  They were built mainly to pump the sea off of the land and thanks to ever improving technology, as they break down they aren't rebuilt.  This one was being refurbished (hence the scaffolding) because it was a museum.

It was also here in Leiden I got my first lesson in street walking. No not that kind of street walking! It was practically impossible to walk down the street without either being run over by other people or bikes and occasionally a car . They have no sense of my side of the street and your side.  People and bikes are everywhere and every horizontal surface is apparently considered road.  You have no idea how often I almost ran straight into someone riding a bike.  I got really good at jumping out of the way. And at every train station you'd see something like this:

 Bike parking.  This is just one small parking lot. There was another one up on the street to the left.  I have literally never seen so many bikes in all my life.

Some of my favorite things in Leiden:

Street Market

We stumbled upon this awesomeness by accident while we were trying to find a bakery someone had recommended.  What a treat!  It was so fun.

 

 We found the bakery....

and it was delicious!

JayDee got excited about the cheese and some gummy candy shaped like smurfs. 

 He said that he loved those on his mission.

 Canals

They run through every town and have bridges that cross over them all over the place. Most of the bridges were draw bridges. Notice the sail boats on the canal? 

Right in the middle of town!

Row houses on the water 

Old and new mixed right in together

Look at these two front doors.  One as old as the country and the one on the left much newer.  Plus every front window on every house was beautiful. People here care very much how their living spaces look and every window either had lovely curtains or a beautiful flower arrangement.  I loved it!

History

This is the Pilgrim Museum in Leiden.

The actual Mayflower pilgrims came from Leiden.

I learned something new. I didn't know that before coming on this trip.  

This is the Hortus Botanicus (Botanical Center)

The oldest botanical center in The Netherlands 

 

This guy: Clouseus ? was the guy that brought the first tulip from Turkey to Holland.  That's right, tulips are not native to The Netherlands.  They are imports.  

But he made them famous

Here is one of the original tulips that was imported.

So interesting and beautiful! 

Remember that nearly 80% of The Netherlands should be under water.  I loved that this garden lined their walking paths with seashells instead of gravel.  So cool.

This was one of our favorite things in this garden.

We noticed that trees everywhere were espeliered (pronounced espelleeyaid).  It just means that they train the tree to grow a certain way. Usually the branches are trained to grow straight out in lines making the tree flat looking but this one was trained to be a trellis.  JayDee loved this so much he's says he's going to grow one at the botanical garden in Kaysville.  I hope so. 

Imagine this tree all leafed out.

Hema Vorst

  This is one big dog! These were a favorite of JayDee's on his mission and we found a place that sells them right in the Leiden train station.  They are soooooo good.  It's like a bratwurst but they soak it in salt water.  It tastes a lot like cured ham.  Yummy!  Needless to say we had more than one of these on our trip.

 

Gouda

We visited the city Gouda (pronounced Howda). Yes, this is where they make the cheese. I know it's called "Gooda" here but we're American. Do you really think it's pronounced that way in Holland?

Things I loved in Gouda: 

Awesome Staud House (Town Hall)

These guys came out with the chiming of the bells. Sweet!

 

 Cheese Museum

Quaint little gardens

and cafes.

Urinals on the side of old churches.

I have no idea why they have urinals outside churches but hey do and Lindon (the guy) was just looking not actually using the facilities. 

Spikes on rooftops so the birds can't roost.

Really narrow spaces

This is between two buildings. 

And this is a house.

Larry Sagers  can almost touch each side.

Next stop, FloraHolland.  It's like Wall Street for fresh flowers.

Simply amazing to watch.  They say that a flower can be cut in the field, come here, be processed, purchased and shipped to it's final destination within 24 hours. 

It's the largest flower auction in the world.

The building's square footage is over 100 football fields. It's the 5th largest building in the world. All flowers.

 This is the auction room. All these people are bidding on the flowers that are rotating through the room under the screens.

 

Flower Parade

We didn't stay very long at this parade.  JayDee hates crowds and this parade drew a huge one.  I'm up on JayDee's shoulders to get these shots.  It is a cool parade though.  It starts at 9am and ends at 9pm after traveling a 24 mile route through a ton of towns. Every float is covered with flowers.  Kind of like the Rose Parade I'm told.  But all these flowers are bulb flowers.

Keukenhof Garden

Simply put, the most amazing garden I have ever been to. This was a highlight for sure.  This garden is only open 2 months out of the year, during bulb season.  It is completely redesigned every year. AMAZING!

 2 headed tulip...so cool.

Miniature tulip ground cover, also very cool.

 Yep. They had a windmill too!

 And warm stroopwaffels. Mmmm...

Yes, I was the ultimate tourist and sat in the big shoe.

This one was for my kids.

 Den Hague

Probably my most favorite day on our trip.  We were strictly tourists this day.  I loved it!  We started our day at Scheveningen Beach.  Don't even attempt this pronunciation.  The name of this beach was used as a password during WWII because it is so hard to pronounce only Dutch people could say it just right.

I touched the North Sea!

Maduradam

(The Netherlands in miniature)

The bird here can help with scale.

This is the only peek into the Red Light District 

you (or I) am going to get.

Peace Palace

The international court.  Built after WWII.  Paid for by Andrew Carnegie.  All international crimes are tried here. 

Queen's Square

The Netherlands has a royal family.  Den Hague is the royal capital of The Netherlands. This square houses the Queen's Church (to the left) and parliament buildings (to the right) and cute old couples on benches. 

 This is one of the outside wall of Queen's Square

  

And this is the bench outside Queen's Square. I love this picture.  Lindon, JayDee and Jerry enjoying some olebolen. It's like a big round scone filled with pudding and topped with powdered sugar.  We had to stop here probably 3 times during our 2 day stay in Den Hague.  They were addicted.

This is the one and only of JayDee's missionary apartments we found while on our trip.  I loved seeing where he actually lived 17 years ago. 

  

After our day in Den Hague, we spent our evening in Delft. This is the place where the blue and white ceramics that Holland is famous for are made. I loved Delft.  Here I'm trying to give you an idea of what an average town square in Holland looks like.  On one end of the square you have the Staud House.

On the other end is always an old church.

And running down both sides are little shops and restaurants.

Here is one of many delft shops in Delft.

The next few days were spent traveling around by car versus train, which is how we traveled most of the time.  We covered a lot of ground and by the end of these 3 days I felt like we'd seen the whole country.

Here we are at a state of the art greenhouse.  This guy is a cutting edge greenhouse owner who uses LED colored lights to bring costs down and growth of plants up.

The Hoek van Holland
This is the western corner/tip of Holland.  It's the main entrance into the largest shipping port at Rotterdam.  It was sooooo windy, the wind could literally hold you up. 

This is the northern tip of Holland at Den Helder. This is the dike that is holding back the ocean.  It's not the best picture but look closely and you can tell the ocean is actually higher than the town down below. This was also at low tide, the difference would be much more noticeable when the tide came in.

JayDee helping to build a dike.

Here we are in farm country.  Up on the north-east portion of the country.  It is absolutely beautiful up there.  Very quaint and old.  We stopped at a farm unannounced and this farmer was gracious enough to show us around.  He spoke very little English and JayDee had a hard time translating his Dutch because he didn't really learn farm/science lingo on his mission. So it was an adventure and pretty cool.

JayDee, Lindon and Jerry learning about the work this farmer is doing with genetics and breeding. 

 Me getting acquainted with Silver, his prize winning cow.

 

 Some of his sheep. They are called Texil sheep and are bred for their meat rather than their wool.  They certainly don't look like the ones we're used to seeing around here.

 We passed a lot of tulip fields and they were always a stunning sight.

This is Kinderdike.  A windmill preserve.  If you've ever seen a postcard or calendar picture or something like that where there is a field full of windmills, you are looking a Kinderdike.  These windmills used to be used to move the canal water from one place to the next.  One windmill would pump the water to the next windmill and so forth. They're not being used for that any more. We got to tour this windmill.  They were like lighthouses.  People used to live inside.

 JayDee loved these wooden shoe muck boots hanging inside the windmill. 

A storm rolled in while we were there. We got drenched running back to our car but JayDee captured this amazing picture.  This is the actual color.  We didn't doctor the photo at all.

While we waited out the storm we decided we'd hunt down the relatively new temple.  It's called The Hague Temple but it's actually in Zootemeer. It was quite the adventure trying to find it.  There really aren't any high places in The Netherlands so we knew it wasn't built on a hill. We also knew it was a small temple so it could be anywhere. After questioning our GPS enough times we just decided listen to it and what do you know?  It took us right there.  It just wasn't in an area that we thought they'd build a temple. Although the neighborhood didn't really look like the temple neighborhoods around here it was still a temple and it was thrilling to see it.  JayDee was sure he'd never see a temple built in The Netherlands in his lifetime so it was a very humbling treat to see.

We visited a few more gardens and here's a smattering of some of the those pics.

We didn't see the sun much on this trip and here I'm just soaking it in.

 It was fun to pull yourself across a canal to get from the main garden to the children's garden on the other side.

Having some fun in the children's garden.

The Floriade

This was kind of like the Olympics of horticulture.  The Floriade is a garden expo that is put on every 10 years and it's always in Holland but in a new location every time.  They take 100s of acres of land, take 10 year to build it and after it's 6 month run it is then donated to the city it's in as a park.  Multiple countries contribute to building it and are a part of the expo.  We expected this to be completely awesome but it really wasn't that great.  Too commercial not enough gardens. There were some fun things....

They had a mascot,

 tulip chairs that folded up to look like a tulip when you weren't sitting in it,

places to relax,

 a dragon that breathed fire,

trees with scarves,

 a hammock for more relaxing,

 and dresses made of flowers to try on.

So all in all it wasn't bad but we'd take a walk through Keukenhof over this place any day. So we left early and took the train to a random town an hour away just to see a church.  I've said previously that there were lots of old churches in this country but this one was simply outstanding. I can't even describe it and these pictures don't do it justice but it's all I've got.

Belgium

Before we headed home we wanted to spend a couple of days in the other country JayDee served in while on his mission.  Belgium. By now we were so ready to come home but we made due.  Probably the most spectacular thing we saw in Belgium was the train station.  Seriously it was like the Capital building in Salt Lake but even more ornate in places.  And it was a train station! Crazy.

There are 4 levels of track.  JayDee said when he was here 17 years ago that they only had track on the ground level (or top here) so in that time they have excavated 3 stories under ground to add that many more tracks. 

Antwerp's Staud House

The first thing JayDee wanted to do in Belgium was eat mussels.  They are famous for them there and were offered in almost every restaurant.  Unfortunately, for JayDee these mussels weren't quite as good as he remembered them.  He was up most of the night with food poisoning.

We thought we better get a train picture before we left since that was our main source of transportation.  The Belgian trains were definitely not as nice as the Holland trains.  Actually that could be said when comparing everything from these two countries.  

We visited the city Brugge on our last day.  It was the sunniest and nicest day of our whole trip.  (Notice I'm not wearing my jacket in these pictures.) Brugge was a romantic type city.  Lovely cafes, canals, streets and buildings.  

We indulged and took a canal boat ride which was very fun. 

As lovely as Brugge was, we were ecstatic to be going home!

We got up early, ate breakfast at the train station and boarded our last train for the airport at about 7am.  It was a 2 hour train ride from Belgium back up to Amsterdam and with all our luggage it was almost miserable.  Their trains really aren't made for transporting luggage.  We got to the airport and checked in, which was an adventure because things run so differently there than they do here. We had another sleepless 10 hour flight back to the United States and landed in Tennessee.  Being on U.S. soil meant customs for us. I was nervous because I have never done customs before and we had lots of souvenirs, including a rather large wheel of cheese.  We made it through customs fine but when we went through security they questioned us about the cheese.  They had to do a drug test on it. I guess to make sure we hadn't stuffed it with drugs.  The wheel of cheese got a special security screening but came out clean. Phew! Not that I was worried they'd find anything, it just makes you uncomfortable to be singled out of the crowd. With just under 3 hours to go before being home we could hardly contain ourselves.  The flight to Salt Lake was fantastic.  There was hardly anyone on the plane so we got to stretch out on the seats and we finally slept for the last hour of the flight.  

It was after 10pm when we got home Tuesday, May 1st but my Mom and Dad kept the kids up so they could welcome us home.  I had never been so happy to see them ever!  And I never slept better than that first night home.  There really is no place like home!