Haarlem

France Adventure, Part 14

/ Terry / 1 Comment

10-1-08, by Jodi

There was a huge rain and windstorm all night. We decide to use this as our lazy rest and a walk around Haarlem day. We just hope it clears enough tomorrow when we train into Amsterdam. Inge brings breakfast to the room at 8:30. There was a beautiful, large tray outside our door on a small table. We brought it in to the dining table and had pink grapefruit, OJ, coffee, a basket of warm bread and croissants, raspberry jam, hard-boiled eggs, and a platter of ham and cheese. Breakfast was very good and nice to eat leisurely in the room at our dining table for a change. We watched some news as the rain the wind raged outside. Our Internet connection went out, we suppose because of the bad weather.

Haarlem

Haarlem

By noon, the rain stopped and sky partly cleared so we decided to try for a walk. We walked up to the main square, admiring the Dutch homes, buildings, churches and canals. We continued on to the train station to check it out for tomorrow and ended up buying our round trip tickets into Amsterdam, E6 each. By 2 pm we had walked the whole town and the hard rain had started again.

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France Adventure, Part 13

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9-30-08 – Haarlem, by Jodi

We wake up to rain, our good, clear weather has finally run out. And of course it rains when we want to visit an outdoor museum. We walk down the 3 flights of stairs to Margot’s ‘in kitchen’ dining room for breakfast. She pulled out all the stops for her great breakfast, we didn’t know where to start. There was granola, milk, drinkable yogurt, regular yogurt, a huge basket of all kind of warm breads, jams, butters, a platter of 3 different kind of lunchmeats and 2 cheeses, a basket of wedge spreadable cheeses, a bowl of strawberries, soft boiled eggs, coffee, hot chocolate, and OJ. YUM – our best breakfast yet and we stuffed ourselves. We were glad to have such bellyful knowing we would be walking the museum all day.

Streetcar Tracks, Netherlands Outdoor Museum

Streetcar Tracks

We thanked Margot for her hospitality and drive the 2 km to the Netherlands Open Air Museum. This museum is a collection of historic buildings from all areas of the Netherlands, relocated to this wooded land to form it’s own little historic village. The buildings included mostly farm homes, windmills, businesses, a train station and roundhouse, a doctor’s office, blacksmith, milk and cheese factory, and a brewery all from different eras depicting the lifestyle from that time. The center of the town are buildings converted to be used as a bakery and restaurants to buy food. Some of the buildings had people dressed in period dress that would answer questions, it was very interesting talking to them. Other buildings were well signed in several languages explaining their history or function.

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