Onze Nederland Bezoek – Dag 1

So, I thought I would write a little bit about our trip to The Netherlands. It is such a beautiful country.

We had a nice smooth sailing on the ferry from Dover to Calais. I think it was deceptively smooth for Jamie as the ride back was anything but. That story is on Jamie’s blog. You can check it out here

We arrived later than we had wanted to at the hotel. We were on the motorway just outside Antwerp and it had been closed due to a couple of accidents. That put is about an hour or so behind schedule. I emailed the hotel to let them know we would be late. I never received any reply so presumed it wouldn’t be an issue. Luckily it was a fairly big hotel and reception was 24 hours.

Day 1 included the following trips: Edam cheese market and then to Haarlem to the Ten Boom house. We had planned to get to the cheese market about 10 which meant a wake up of about 7:30 as it was a 90 minute drive to get there. We both decided – well Jamie more than me – that we needed some extra hours of zeds. We ended up leaving about 10:45 to head up to Edam. It was a nice drive up there – minus the sat nav (We really appreciate you letting us use it KT) lady trying to confuse us. LOL. It doesn’t take much to do that.

We got to Edam and it is a beautiful town. Very picturesque. There were a couple of canals running through the town. I can’t describe how nice the town was so I will let the pictures and video do the talking. The cheese market was being packed away but we got to see some of it and see the marketeers in traditional Dutch dress. It was awesome.

We parked on the side of the canal in Edam and the houses and other buildings were not tatty and worn like they are here in England. The next picture is from where we parked.

We crossed over the bridge to head towards the square where the cheese market is held. On our way across the bridge we came by this church. Turns out it is now a graphics studio. Still a nice building for the area.

We then headed into the market square where they hold the cheese market. Like I said, we got to the packing up of the market but there was still quite a bit of cheese there and lots of people still there. We managed to find people dressed in traditional costume. We just had to take a picture of it.

We also heard a music box on the square. I took a video of it. Turns out it was a gentleman that was cranking the handle to make it play. It was cool to see.

After our visit to Edam, we then headed towards Haarlem so we could go to the Ten Boom House museum. Jamie has read the book The Hiding Place and wanted to visit the house since we were going to be so close.

Sat Nav lady had a bit of a hard time getting us there. She got confused in Haarlem as to where we needed to be. In the end we found somewhere to park and we wandered into the centre of town trying to find the house. After a bit of Googling we found the street where we needed to be. The house was only about 100 feet from where we were looking at Google. Go figure!

We got to he house and there was a small queue. We were the lats ones in the queue and lucky to get in for the tour. Turns out that it was the last tour of the day! Lucky or what!

It was a good tour. The guide took us round the house and talked about how the house was during the war and also how and where the Jews were hidden. It was good to know that people like Corrie Ten Boom were there to help the persecuted Jews.

We took a couple of pictures from the tour and they are below.