Entry 9 September 22 Touring Friesland with family

[David and Susan Bratt]

Entry 9--Monday, September 22

We have spent the last eight days and nine nights with Rover parked in one place, but we have traveled about 700 miles with one brother and sister of Sue’s, their spouses, and one niece.

We have seen the oldest house in Leeuwarden, where Grandma Vonhof was born and the house in Winterswiijk where Grandpa Vonhof was born. We also met a newfound third cousin there. We saw the statue of Afka’s Teintal (Ten Children) in Wergea, where Grandpa Feenstra was born. At Arnhem we saw the Bridge Too Far and were given too short tours of Leiden and Delft by still another cousin and saw many lovely towns and villages along the way. And we were glad we weren’t the ones doing the driving.

It is not unusual to look out across this flat landscape and see a church tower, a wind turbine, and a sailboat(!) in the distance. Ditches instead of fences separate farm fields, and the sailboats move along the many canals that connect the towns. There are supposedly more boats than people in Friesland; certainly there are more wind turbines than windmills; and most certainly of all, bicycles outnumber everything except maybe cows. As new residents of Minneapolis, which prides itself on its bike-friendliness, it’s humbling to see how much further the Dutch have carried that idea than we have.

We have been blessed with great weather every day, although people here tell us it has rained all summer. We have found great restaurants with even greater (in the sense of higher) prices and enjoyed the wine and beer and being together. We have learned a lot about traffic signs and laws, and we had a great time with the family, but we are looking forward to being on our own again starting tomorrow.