The easy highlight of this past October was the Netherlands.

This is where my wife was born, and lived until she was eight. She then moved to Australia where she eventually met me and we got married. Visits back to the Netherlands have been few and far between, and not taken place at all for the last 13 years. There are lots of uncles and aunts and cousins that still live there so we decided it was time to get back there.

We were only there for two and a half weeks, but it was longer than all of my other visits to the Netherlands combined, and was long enough to see most of the relatives that are still there. It was also enough to see an amazing array of churches, canals, windmills, and cheese. All told we got to 8 of the country’s 12 provinces, and so lots of amazing and beautiful old cities.

Also, there were some treacherous staircases.

Seriously, extremely treacherous staircases!

There were other interesting things too, like this big rubbish bin that had a bit of a Dalek-vibe to it.

Interestingly, it had a special slot for pizza boxes, which to me feels next level.

In some areas of the country there are lots of old churches that don’t function as churches anymore. For instance, here is a church building that is now a bookstore, located in Maastricht.

And here is another church that has become a bookstore, this time in Zwolle.

Check out the big organ.

I checked out the comics here, but even though there were some in English, there was nothing I was interested in enough to buy.

I did see this, though–not sure what that was about.

Also, it turned out that when they were renovating this building, they find this…

Somebody’s bones, now kept in a display case on the floor!

Also, we went to this place called Zaanse Schans, which has this collection of historic windmills and old houses.

But it’s also got various attractions to go and look at, including this.

I mean…free cheese. Why not?

Inside, in addition to the cheese, there were also these old-style advertisements for cheese, which struck me in various ways.

In this one, for instance, this woman has a kind of Come-hither look to her.

And this woman definitely looks like she made her cheese out of the corpses of her last visitors!

We ended up on three boat rides while we were there. A Canal Cruise in Amsterdam…

A ride near a cute town near Giethoorn with a cousin in his medium-sized boat (and by that I really mean the medium-sized boat out of the boats this cousin owns).

We couldn’t go by boat to Giethoorn itself because the water was too low, but we did walk in there and it was a very interesting and cute little place.

Indeed, according to this article in Forbes, it’s the fourth most beautiful village in the world!

And then we also went on another uncle’s boat along Ijssel (a distributary of the Rhine) and then on Ganzendiep (another river).

We all got a turn steering the boat!

Other interesting observations?

A lot of the houses we’ve visited had kitchen chairs with wheels on them, for easy mobility.

And almost everyone had fridges that looked like kitchen cupboards, which I thought was a nice idea.

Donald Duck is doing well here.

There was this door with a shovel for a door knocker.

There was some delicious-looking sweet stuff that I couldn’t eat…

And about the prettiest darn cat I’ve ever seen!

Anyway, it was an amazing time, and such a blessing and encouragement to be able to do.

Get there if you can!

Now we’re onto the United States, which I’ll have to talk about in another post.