The Netherlands is really tiny, which is why it's still so suprising to me that if you drive for an hour, the landscape is different, the weather is different, and the people speak a different dialect of Dutch. For our vacation we ended up two and half hours away from Akersloot; in Drenthe. Drenthe is a province of the Netherlands in the most northern part, next to Friesland (where they speak Fries... no one can understand it!). The landscape is a lot the same as here, but there's less cars, people, buildings, and cities. Almost everything is farm land, and the houses are white stone cottages with thatched roofs. The older houses are built attached to the barn's or "kop, hals, romp" (head, neck, butt) like Milja had learned at school. There's the house, an area between, and then the barn- all built together.
This is starting to sound a little bit like we drove right into the wilderness and spent a week living with the cows and the sheep. That's not really how it was... with six people we stayed in an eight person house. There were two bathrooms, a bathtub, a tanning bed, a sauna, and four two person bedrooms. So, we weren't sleeping in a barn stall or anything.
We left for Drenthe on Monday afternoon and drove straight to The Land van Bartje (the park where we stayed).
Every morning we slept in, showered, and ate a long slow breakfast. By the time we were out the door it was usually noon or so. We'd do something in the area, or drive a little ways, and then come back and cook dinner. One of our afternoons was spent walking in the woods, another one grocery shopping, and playing games. One afternoon we drove around the entire area looking at "hunnebedden" these piles of rocks (to put it eloquently) where people were buried under during the ice age. I'm trying hard here, but I can't work up all that much enthusiasm for the hunnebedden. The first stop was interesting, but after a few stops I'd pretty much had it.
Though, in defense from the hunnen (who made the hunnebedden), I have to say that it was probably pretty hard work to pile all those rocks on top of each other. And they are an improtant part of Dutch history. So, I suppose I'm glad I got to see them.
The day after we went to the hunnebedden, we drove to a seal nursery about 40 minutes away. A woman started the seal nursery from her house with just a few seals, and it's grown into something huge. People from all over the Netherlands call this nursery if they find a sick or injured seal and then the volunteers come get them. The seals go through all of these different phases of rehabilitation, and once they're healed they get released back into the wild. Seals are much cuter and more exciting than hunnebedden. The ones outside in the water, that were going to be realeased soon were super active. They made noise, and rolled around, and played with each other a ton. After we spent a little bit of time by the seals we drove back to our "Drenthe huis" through a big city called Groninge. In the fall I ran a four mile race there, but I didn't get to see very much of the city or anything. This time we walked through the centrum and went in a few of the stores. We drove back home in the dark, and everyone collapsed on the couch.
On Friday we started the drive back to North Holland, but we made a few stops along the way. Our route was through Friesland, so I can check another province of The Netherlands off my list. The first stop was a town called Sneek, where we drank coffee and Anita bought a ton of things to hang up in the garden of our school. The next stop was much longer, and that was at a planetarium in a small town. The man who lived there had built a working model of the solar system in the 1600's. Don't expect an explanation of how he did it, but the earth, the sun, the moon, and all of the planets rotated around each other at the same speed that they actually do. It was a sort of huge clock made out of 10,000 rotating pegs. There was a weight hanging from a pendulum, and the weight made the pegs move and everything else with them. There were clocks that showed the date, the time, which star sign it is now, and the year. There I was in Friesland- looking at our entire solar system!
After we left the planetarium we made another very short stop by the afsluitdijk. It's a dike that separates the North Sea from the Ijsselmeer. The road is 32 km long, and that's all it is. The road, on water on both sides. We got out of the car for about 30 seconds, took a picture, and then got back in. The wind here is nothing to laugh about!
There you have it. A week of vacation in Drenthe, the Netherlands. Now when I read about the things we went to see, it doesn't sound like that much, but it was vacation, and what made it vacation wasn't running around all day long seeing even more hunnebedden, and museums, and who knows what. What made it vacation was being able to sleep in until 8:00, and sitting at the breakfast table for two hours. It was playing games when it rained outside, putting on mud masks, drinking cappucinos, sitting in the bathtub and the sauna, watching the younger girls get incredibly hyper from all the candy they ate, and baking chocolate chip cookies in the microwave. Vacation can't get much better than that.
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