Holland - Day 1

We enjoyed a good breakfast, and then went on the Forchbahn to the airport to go catch our 12:30 flight to Amsterdam. We made good time getting there, and didn't have any problems except that our plane took off about 30 min later than expected. Fortunately though, there's a play area, so we just sent Dad and Andy on to the gate to give us updates on when we needed to show up. The play areas make such a difference in how I feel about airports :). Instead of being a completely stressful experience, the play area is a safe area for Carsten to play and we both actually have fun :). Anyway, the flight was great and Carsten slept for most of the flight which was quite nice. Even better for me was that he fell asleep on Andy, so I was free to talk, read, and eat. Once we landed we got our 7-seater Peugot rental car and headed out of town to Balbrug, where a relative on my Grandma Hoogeveen's side lived. I must say that we enjoyed the drive of Holland's countryside and I was super excited to see trucks and signs from Hoogeveen. I even had Andy stop the car so I could go take a few photos of the signs to Hoogeveen :). Here's a few photos from our car ride:

First siting of something Hoogeveen!

Grandma kept Carsten happy while I navigated and took photos :).

Our amazing driver!

I think this is right after I saw the Hoogeveen truck. Biggest smile ever.

Holland is FLAT. And we were supposed to have terrible weather. Glad we didn't!

First Huis sitings! 

The sign I made our car stop for (see the car in the background - that's everyone else).

I know which way I would go!

Hillie, my relative, graciously let us live with her for 2 nights and showed us around to different sites in the area that were important for my ancestors (such as where they lived and were buried). We were late in arriving to Hillie's thanks to our late departure in Zurich, and we ended up finding her by calling her on her phone and seeing her step out of her house as we couldn't find any house numbers to guide us :). We had a tour of Hillie's charming home, and then sat down to a lovely supper of Hungarian cheese soup, pork roast, potatoes, and vegetables. When we sat down, we thought that the soup was the main course, we were wrong of course so we ended up eating waaay too much good food. But since it was delicious, it was worth it. We even got to have Hillie's rum cake for dessert. Again, amazing! Unfortunately, all her recipes are secret, so we cannot attempt to reproduce them. But perhaps it's for the best since you can't always reproduce recipes correctly anyway. :) Hillie's place was beautiful and some important things to note are that our tall men could not even attempt to fit through the front door, the roof was thatched (so cute!), and she had a couple of ponies out front that Carsten was pretty taken with. Here's a few photos:

Ponies

Hillie's house.

Thatched roof and short doors!

Beautiful sunset in Hillie's backyard. The sunsets were noticeably later here.

Hillie's art studio. She's a fantastic painter!

We got Carsten to bed rather later than usual, and we also went to bed quite a bit later than usual. Luckily, Carsten slept in past 8 am the next morning, which was amazing because it got light at 4:30 am!