Europe Train Trip - Part 5 of 5 [Netherlands]

Our final stop on our journey was the Netherlands, where we rented a car and stayed in an Airbnb about a half-hour southeast of Amsterdam on a lake in a town called Loosdrecht. The house we stayed in was wonderful, with a patio right on the enclosed harbor of the lake, a kitchen for us to cook in, and was right across the street from a nice grocery store.

We spent three nights at the house. The first day we got to the house from Brussels, got settled, and had a top-notch sushi dinner right on the lake, a short walk from our house. The second day was a day for us all to catch our breath - no early-morning start and no planned activities. We wound up driving down to Utrecht, a small city about twenty minutes south of us, where we rented bikes and rode out in the Dutch countryside, seeing a pair of windmills. We cooked dinner at our house that night, steaming some local mussels over pasta, along with some Gouda cheese and local herring from the North Sea.

The third day we went in to Amsterdam - we took the train from a nearby town, Breukelen (the origin of Brooklyn). In Amsterdam we took a wonderful guided canal cruise on a small boat with a captain and ten people (and some wine and Dutch cheese!), had lunch at a cafe along one of the canals, and then visited the Anne Frank house. A bit exhausted, we got takeout from a local Italian restaurant.

We woke up on the following day, our final full day in Europe, left the house, and toured a bit more of the Dutch countryside. We went to Kinderdijk, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site as it is the best grouping of windmills in the Netherlands, including about twenty windmills along the river. From there we drove through Rotterdam and then The Hague, the de facto capital of the Netherlands which has a nearby beach town where we walked along a sandy North Sea beach and then went back into The Hague and visited the International Criminal Court, where John and Henry sat in the gallery for part of a trial for someone from the Sudan who is being tried for war crimes (though the session was in closed session, so we weren't able to hear any of the proceedings, just watched them). From there we drove by Leiden, which was a fitting final stop for our tour - it was where the Pilgrims sailed off on the Mayflower setting off for America four hundred years earlier. 

For us, we would head to American the following day - we stayed at a hotel connected to the airport, had dinner, and then woke up early for our ten-hour flight home! An exhausting but unforgettable journey!

View from the patio at our house in Loosdrecht

According to Jack and Henry, among the best sushi they've had anywhere

Biking to windmills outside of Utrecht

Mussels fest

Our rental car for our final four days of our trip

Our canal boat

Amsterdam

The windmills of Kinderdijk

The waves of the North Sea at Scheveningen, near The Hague

The International Criminal Court at The Hague

Leaving the hotel at 6:30am ...

... and arriving back in the U.S. about sixteen hours later !