Utrecht

The day started with thick fog all over the polder where the farm is located. Pretty magical stuff, but hard to capture in the camera.

The fog burned off quickly and caused no problems in getting to our first destination for the day: Utrecht.

It was market day in Utrecht.

The main focus in Utrecht is a visit to the places associated with my Mom’s father and mother. My grandfather worked in a bakery located at Oudegracht 319. These days it is an apartment building.

There is more info on this building in a post from our last visit in 2015: Huis Grijsesteijn

The church that you see in the background is the Geertekerk (St. Gertrude’s church). Originally build around 1255, then torn down and built within the city walls, it started as a Roman Catholic parish church. When the Protestant Reformation took hold in the Netherlands in 1578, Catholicism was outlawed and the building was given to the Reformed Church which used it until the 1930s. It then lay dormant and deteriorating until 1954 when it was purchased by the Remonstrant church and restored. This is the church where my grandfather and grandmother met, although they did not marry until they came to the U.S.

No visit to Utrecht would be complete without stopping in at Modelaine, the local knitting shop.

Lunch was a Hemaworst Broodje, enjoyed on the lamp-post bench in front of the store. Lekker!

Here are a few more shots from around Utrecht today. It was a beautiful day and everyone seemed to be out and enjoying it.

Amsterdam

After a restful Sunday, Monday was anything but restful because it was the day for Amsterdam! Amsterdam is a very walkable city, and by the time we had finished the day my pedometer said I had logged 21,398 steps and spent almost 4 hours walking. We were tired, but had a great time!

Here are a few shots from our walk around the city.

Long lines, as usual, at the Anne Frank house.

Our day started with the Noordermarkt – a weekly flea market that was much busier than we’ve seen on other visits. We are guessing that it is because this is summer season and wonderful weather for it.

Part of the Noordermarkt experience is a visit to Café Winkel 43. The guidebooks will tell you that they have the best appeltaart around so the line was out the door. Although we’ve had other great appeltaart, I’m thinking that Winkel’s reputation is well deserved.

We’ve wanted to see one of the canal house museums. The Grachtenhuis museum turned out to be closed on Monday, but not far away were the Van Loon home and Willet-Holthuysen homes so we visited them. It is always interesting to see the inside of homes to see how people really lived. In this case, it shows how much wealth you had to have in order to live in this neighborhood. These are real “Downton Abbey Style” places.

A stop at Stephen and Penelope’s is always fun.

On the way to The Pantry for dinner, we needed a little nourishment to keep our legs going. In keeping with our theme of trying foods which we haven’t had before, we had Rundvleeskroket from the local Febo. Pretty good, but not high on my list for repeating.