The Netherlands - September 9 - 17, 2006

Utrecht

Utrecht is a city of about 300,000 very near the center of the Netherlands. It's a modern city with a University, a large mall, one of the busiest train stations in the country, lots of shops, museums, restaurants etc. but you wouldn't know that from my pictures. I like to photograph the quiet spots, the hidden courtyards, etc. So to anyone from Utrecht, who feels their city is misrepresented here, I apologize.

A canal in Utrecht

Cloisters of the big church in Utrecht

A smaller canal in Utrecht.

A small street.

Another canal.

A courtyard in the heart of the city.

I would have liked this picture better without the Heineken truck, but nothing could be more typical of a Dutch city than a Heineken truck in the middle of a pedestrian street. Here you also see the Dom tower at the end of the street.

How many bulldogs do you see? Kathy and I sat across from this shop and had lunch here. As we watched more and more dogs came out of the shop.

Some tall narrow buildings in the center of town.

Kathy and I stopped here for frappés and dessert, when it got too warm to keep walking around.

Kathy, Gregg and I had supper at this African restaurant in the very popular canal area of Utrecht.

This is the neo-gothic church St. Wilibrord. Every square inch inside was painted. It was gorgeous! The renovation is fairly recent.

Another of the many pictures I took of this church.

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Around Utrecht

We made some excursions out of Utrecht by bicycle, train, bus and by car.

One day we went on a long bicycle ride and saw these two windmills along the way.

Another typical scene in the Dutch countryside.

A restaurant in the little town of Haarzuilens.

One of the roads we bicycled down.

A picnic in a park. I took this while people were eating-oops.

The castle De Haar, extensively restored in the late 19th century is now a popular tourist attraction in this area.

Groeneveld Palace

The main floor hall inside the palace.

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Amersfoort

Kathy and I took a train from Utrecht to Amersfoort-about a 20-minute ride.

Here's where we had lunch at an old cafe. In our opinion it was too hot to sit in the sun.

The main shopping street in Amersfoort.

A small side street.

The top of the tower seen above another roof.

We took a short ride on the canals in a small boat.

Another picture taken from the boat.

Another street in Amersfoort.

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Spakenburg

Spakenburg is a small town that used to be on the sea coast and had a thriving sea fishing industry. But when Holland closed off the large bay and made it an inland, freshwater sea, the town was forced to change. There are now three museums in the town devoted to the old way of life. In this town women wore the traditional dress of the village until the 1980's and some of them still wear them. In the few hours that we were there, Kathy and I saw several women in traditional clothes.

These are old fishing boats sitting in the harbor in Spakenburg. These boats are being refurbished and used as pleasure craft now.

This is inside one of the museums. This is an interior of 1925. Girls wore those fur-trimmed caps summer and winter, from the time they were one till they were 14.The woman in the cupboard bed has just had a baby.

A woman on the street chatting with a friend.

An old woman we spotted walking into town. The purple color of her costume suggests that she is in mourning.

Another woman riding by. As you can see it is the older women who carry on the tradition of the costumes. It may soon die out all together, to be seen only in the museums.

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Gouda

A street near the town center in Gouda.

The Town Hall in Gouda. There was a wedding party outside this one. In Holland most people are married in the town hall.

A café in a courtyard near the big St. John church, where we had a snack.

We couldn't visit Gouda without stopping in a cheese shop.

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Open-air Museum - Arnhem

Outside of Arnhem is a wonderful Open-air museum with buildings from all parts of Holland that have been moved here.  They are mostly smaller buildings from farms and villages and have been moved with their interiors intact. They are grouped according to the regions they came from. This museum was founded in 1912 and served as housing for evacuees from Arnhem during WWII.

In the area called Zaan, the buildings were mostly green with white trim.

Thatched roofs are still found in Holland. This one came from Haareveld. This was a farm house in which the people and animals all lived under one roof.

Of course my favorite part was the interiors.

Another interior showing a wall of Delft tiles.

This living area is at the far end of a long dark barn. There was nothing separating it from the area used by the animals.

The museum had four working windmills. Here you see two smaller ones.

This is taken from just below the mill in the picture above.

Zofia demonstrating how the miller would climb up onto the wing to unfurl the sail. If the mill is too tall to be reached from the ground there is a platform just below the bottom of the sails.

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