Last night (after the blog was done), we were able to stream Ferris Bueller's Day Off from Netflix for Josh to watch. Of course he loved it. We told him not to get any good ideas.
One thing we are doing well is sleeping. All of us are sleeping very well. Even that first night was good. The jet lag was not an issue, thankfully. It will be nice when we head to Tanzania on Tuesday because they are only 1 or 2 hours difference from here.
Before I describe today's events, I need to comment again on the bikes. Not only does nobody wear helmets, kids are on their own seats on these bikes with their parents. Restraints/seat belts? Ha! Kids must bounce here better than in our country. We have seen kids standing on their seat and sitting facing out or backwards. In fact today I saw a 2 year old that had a handle bar (if she chose to use it) -- but she rode with her hands stretched outwards trying to balance herself. Every once in a while she would come back to regain balance with the handle bar.
The other things is the texting while biking. We talk about texting while driving back home but here, it seems that 20% of the people are looking down at their phones while riding. There have to be a lot of biking accidents here but we haven't seen one. Oh wait.. (more to come)
Today's agenda was to visit The Hague -- and to visit what was supposedly a nice town just outside of it called Delft. The Hague was top on Josh's list because of the car museum (Louwman Museum) there. We headed there first -- a quick 50 minute train ride and a short bus ride. The museum is outside of town but it was impressive. The outside is really neat:
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| Louwman Museum Entrance |
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| Maclaren F1 outside the museum |
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| Now that's a nice (well you know) |
The museum is a private car collection and they had a lot of impressive cars on display. They also have a lot of memorabilia. Josh was in heaven. Here are a sampling of the many cars (Josh has about 50 more of these pics but I've tried to cut them down to just a few highlights here)
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| One of Elvis' many Cadillacs |
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| One of the 4 cars from Goldfinger |
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| 1952 Jaguar XK120 Fixed Head Coupe |
It took us a good 1.5 hours to go through the entire collection. They also had a great app for your phone to listen to details about the best of the best. To top it off, they had a great cafe for lunch in a well decorated interior:
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| Cafe interior -- view from our table |
Those white-linen tables were not ours. They were preparing for an event. But the room is very impressive.
From there, we took a quick 10 minute train ride to the neighboring city of Delft which Rick Steves says is much more interesting than The Hague. And he was right. This city rivals Bruges in terms of beauty and charm. (yes, I'm lifting up my pinkie finger when I say that) We took a 1 hour canal cruise through the city and walked around the quaint streets. Right when we got there, we finally saw a small bike accident. A smaller car was slowly pulling across an intersection waiting to get past the bikers when a younger woman (maybe 18?) comes along and just plows right into the side of the car -- who was basically stopped waiting for a few others to clear the rest of the way. She was going really slow so she didn't fall or anything. I don't know what the lady was doing because we all thought she would just stop when she got close like everyone else. Nope. And she wasn't looking at her phone. She was looking right at the car. Almost purposefully hitting him. Anyway, the driver was super pissed because it left a mark (didn't look like a dent though) and she was turning around to continue around him when he jumped out of his car and was barking something in Dutch to her. She didn't hustle fast enough because the driver reached out and grabbed the back of her bike and pulled her back and forced her to (we think) apologize before he let her go. I wish I knew Dutch so I could understand what he said to her. As far as I could see, she never said much.
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| Delft Canal View |
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| Delft (yes the tower is leaning!) |
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| Wouldn't be Europe without scaffolding and cranes! |
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| Delft |
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| Delft |
We hopped back onto the short 10 minute train back to The Hague to check out the city for an hour or so. The Hague has lots of modern buildings and doesn't have a lot of character but the central square was quite nice with the large pond in front of it.
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| The Hague |
Oh that picture above reminds me how cold it was today. Well, cold for summertime. It was 59 today and windy. I guess that beats a miserably hot day but still..
We headed back to our apartment in Amsterdam and decided to eat in rather than go out. We will be up early tomorrow for a long day out to Efteling -- Europe's oldest and best amusement park. We don't normally think of doing amusement parks while in Europe but this one really looked neat. And we want Josh to have some fun too. Here's part of the dinner course tonight -- with a warm baguette, sliced meat and strawberries added too:
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| Dinner Starter Course at Apartment |
Oh how the Dutch like their cheese.. and I love them for it. We cannot get enough of their cheese..
Time for bed. Wish us luck on our long day tomorrow.. :)
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