Catmull's in Europe

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Beautiful lily pads and flowers in one of the canals.
A flock of geese wanted to join our picnic.
Ashley playing on the playground at the park we had our picnic at.
Mitzi loves to hang and swing on poles.
She's becoming quite the acrobat.
The kids loved playing at parks when we got the chance.
They had a soccer field and we had fund playing a game of soccer.
Brecken and Megan tried their own acrobatics .
Brad and Kindra at our picnic.
The kids loved to play with Mitzi at the parks.
In Gouda near one of the canals they had some boats as well as a small boat you could play on.
A couple friendly cats.
Some really interesting doors.
The old cheese weighing house in downtown Gouda.
Stopping for a break.
Ian was hiding.
The kids have really grown close on the trip.
A beautiful canal in Gouda.
Ashley poses with her ice creame cone by some statues of kids on stilts.

7-30-10 Friday After doing a little shopping and spending a relaxing morning, we took the kids for a picnic in Gouda at a park. They had a play ground in one area, and a soccer field in the other. The littler kids had a great time playing in the playground area, and I played soccer with Brad, Ian, Brecken. We had a lot of fun. After the picnic and park, we took the kids to downtown Gouda and showed them some of the old ships, the townhall, the town square and some of the neat buildings in Gouda.
Mitzi fast asleep. Everyone was tired today after our journey yesterday.
One of the Citroens I like to call "duck-mobiles".
Beautiful flowers in Gouda, Netherlands.
Inside the old town-hall, the beams were fastened together with these pins.
It was market day, and this was the fish stall.
They had these little almost like mini pancakes that they covered with butter and powdered sugar. They were nummy.
We watched this guy carve wodden Dutch shoes from blocks of wood.
Some of the boys and men were dressed in traditional costumes.
Inside the old cheese weighing house, it's now a tourist office.
But they still have a couple of the scales and you can have yourself weighed and given a certificate.
On the outside of the building there's and old depiction of the cheese weighing.
The men and boys looked pretty neat in their costumes.
I'm glad Kindra and I made the effort to go to Gouda as seeing the market, the costumes, and the cheese was pretty neat.
Some of the people and cheese at the market.
Kindra at the market in Gouda.
The old town hall in Gouda is fantastic.

7-29-10 Thursday Today everyone was pretty tired after our long trip to the Netherlands yesterday going from England to France to Belgium and finally to the Netherlands. Wow. 4 different countries in one day. After getting up a little late, we met some of the people who worked at the house we were staying at. The house we are staying at, we did an exchange with a Dutch family who is staying at our house. They are LDS and the mom is American who served a mission in the Netherlands, then came back after her mission and met her husband who is Dutch. They have 4 boys and are staying in the US for a few weeks. They have a home office on the main floor of their home that has 4 floors. Too many different floors for me, but it works fine for us for a few days. The basement that is really the ground floor going out the back, has a kitchen and bathroom. The main floor has a bathroom, a guest bedroom, and a home office that some other people who are LDS work at, the next floor has a large family room and the main bathroom, then the upstairs has 3 bedrooms. If I get hungry or need a drink in the middle of the night, I have to go down 3 flights of stairs, get a drink, then go back up 3 flights of stairs. The 2 people who worked at the house told us that they have a town market in Gouda (only about 5 miles away) on Thursday’s, but it only goes until about 1pm. We tried to get the kids moving, but it was no use, so Kindra and I went to the market. I’m really glad we did. It was really neat. They had a bunch of stalls with food, clothes, etc. In one of them they were selling dutch wooden shoes and there was a guy making them from scratch and you could watch him make them the traditional way. They also had a weith/house that was now a cheese museum and souvenir shop. You can go in and they have this big scale they used to weight the cheese wheels on. You can get weighed on the scales and get a certificate. Lots of kids were doing that and it was pretty neat. You could also guess the weight of a wheel of cheese and at the end of the market the one who guessed closest got the wheel of cheese. They had some younger and older men and girls dressed in traditional Dutch clothing and had lots of wheels of cheese out. They were throwing the wheels back and forth and into the wagons, and it reminded me of when they throw the salmon at Pikes Place market in Seattle. We also got to try stroopwaffles. Whey they don’t have these in the US, I don’t know. I swear they must have some type of addicting drug in them, because they are seriously addicting. They are a type of cookie that they then put like carmel in between these 2 mini hard thin cookie like waffles. Way good. They also had these sardine like fish that were about 6”-8” long that they served kind of raw/pickled on some bread. I tried it, but didn’t care too much for those. We bought some stroopwaffles and a few other things, then took a tour of the townhall that is right in the middle of the square where they have the market. It is way neat. Also the churches around the square are really cool. One of them had lots of bells and plays songs on the bells every hour. Gouda is a really neat little town and reminded me a little of Brugge, but totally different. They also make these mini kind of pancake like things about the size of a silver dollar. They serve about 10 of them on a plate with melted butter and powdered sugar. Those were great too.
Some of the really cool old buildings from Brugge, Belgium.
The boat tour we took around Brugge gave us a good view of the city and took us under lots of bridges.
One of the beautiful views from the boat tour.
There were lots of beautiful swans on the canals. From the boat tour we could see the backs of many of the medieval homes.

As we wandered around town, there were some amazing buildings, churches, etc.
Here's one of the small pubs in town.
A view of one of the canals from one of the bridges in Brugge.
The buildings went right down and into the water. It kind of reminded me of Venice a little.
Ian, Megan, Ashley on the boat tour.
Everyone but me posing on one of the bridges.

7-28-10 Wednesday This morning we got up early and made it to the ferry heading back to France. Our final destination tonight is the Netherlands, but we have to get to France first, then go through Belgium. We made it onto the ferry OK and I got a couple of cabins, even though the trip was only about 2 hours. We were all pretty tired (especially Kindra) and the cabins had beds you could lay down and take a nap on. We got to France and the kids were hungry, so we ended up hitting a McDonalds when we got off the ferry. We headed to Belgium with the idea to stop in Brugge. There is a Belgian waffle place in downtown Salt Lake City near Pioneer Park and the owner there is Belgium. He said if you get the chance you have to go to Brugge, and he was right. Brugge is a really neat place. We took a tour around the city on a little boat through the canals. When we got on the boat that holds about 20-30 people, the boat guide asked us what language and where we were from. When I said near Salt Lake City, he said he had relatives in Roy, Utah, but then I didn’t get a chance to chat with him any more. The tour around was really cool and the place is very quaint and pretty. After the boat tour we strolled around for awhile and found a neat antiques store that had lots of cool stuff. We ended up finding a painting/print and Kindra and I both loved, so we ended up buying it, even though it was going to be a pain to get back home. It was framed, and there was no way to take the print/picture out of the frame. We walked a little more and bought some Belgian chocolates. Kindra especially got a kick out of the naughty ones they had. I had a chocolate covered pistachio marzipan bar that was really good, but Brecken ate almost all of it. We headed to the Netherlands and traveled on some really neat back roads through some of the countryside. A long day, but Brugge was one of my highlights of the trip.