For Bob and Peggy

In my last post I mentioned we had just had our first overnight guests ever to our apartment here in Gorinchem, Netherlands. For 5 days and 4 nights, we had the pleasure of their company!

Peggy goes back to my assisted-living days, when she was our Executive Director. Lucky for me, and I might add with some surprise, after we both retired we kept in touch, meeting for lunch once a month. Somewhere in there, she, who had been widowed, married Bob, who had been single for years after his divorce, with two grown children. I had the good fortune of attending their wedding 7 years ago and ever since, it's been a delightful acquaintance. Peggy often was my confidant when I needed a listening ear and both have been there for Astrid and me from the get-go, supporting us and waving us on to victory, sometimes before anyone else was able.

So it's appropriate they were our first guests! This post is for them.

Our apartment is a one-bedroom apartment with no sofabed, so it's lucky for us that our complex here has 2 guest bedrooms available directly across our courtyard.

Every day we could watch them come-n-go...
(click any image/collage to enlarge)

...for breakfast, first, and then for whatever else was on the agenda after power naps!

That Wednesday when we picked them up at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport (first collage above), we scheduled nothing but a walk around half of our citadel to give them the lay of our land.

I've already taken you on this walk, remember?


See how we celebrated afterwards?! Italian ijs.

That was Wednesday. After a good night's sleep and a good breakfast, we spent Thursday in nearby Culemborg, Wijk bij Duurstede, and Buren, all cities we've visited and wanted them to see.

In Culemborg we wanted them to see the gate and city hall as you can see here from 2010.
As it was, we spent more time at the gate and only peeked at the city hall (seen through the gate in the bottom left-hand corner above).


The biggest thrill for me, however, was seeing this De Hoop windmill from 1854 being painted outside the city gate. It was a first for me.

Then we continued on to Wijk bij Duurstede, our main destination of the day. We just had to show them the world's only drive-through windmill, which we saw in April of 2010.

Yup, Bob and Peggy are in our car (Granny Towanda). They drove through!


Then, on to the Duurstede castle a short walk away...


...where a wedding was actually taking place!
We had read that this castle was often used for weddings, so we were delighted to see it.
(BTW, if an image is Astrid's, I'm adding an 'A' to identify it in my collages now.)

We decided to make one more city stop on our way home and made it Buren from our time there in March of 2010. Some places nearby really impressed us that much, to show them off.

But the surprise of the day was when we walked to De Prins van Oranje windmill....


...and found it was open for us to tour, on a Thursday!
Talk about a gift for Bob who loves to see how things work! It closed right after we left.
(I won't mention that Peggy is afraid of heights and didn't walk up to the top with us.)

We had had a long day....

...but still stopped at our Gorinchem second-hand store before supper that evening.
We are often surprised by little goodies that are vintage and Dutch!

That was Thursday. On Friday, we had a 2 p.m. tour scheduled at the nearby Trappist brewery, but first Astrid headed us to a new city for me, Heusden:


To be honest, it's like a sweet little tourist town! And it's a citadel city, like Gorinchem.


Full of gevelstenen, too! I was in heaven.


But it was the harbor and the windmills to die for.
First, the Nr. 1 windmill from 1971....


...and Nr. II behind it, from 1973. What creative names, right?!

All that before our brewery tour at the Abdij Koningshoeven near Tilburg! Remember when we were there this past February? This time we took the tour because Bob just happens to be a beer connoiseur and even makes his own beer!

Before the tour started, Bob and Peggy sampled the beer.


Then the tour...only 6 of us plus the guide, speaking English...


...followed by another beer that came with the package! No, we're not drunk yet.


And then another beer with our meal. Still not drunk!


Maybe it was the monks sitting outside. Maybe it's just good beer!

You'll be glad to hear that we basically did nothing on Saturday instead of what we had originally planned. We took it easy and finished the remainder of the citadel walk we had already started on Wednesday.

Enough photo-ops to last a lifetime.
And this time Bob treated us to a refreshing drink on our market square,
not far from the ice-cream cones we had had on Wednesday. Full circle.


Astrid propped up her camera and did the timer thing. I love it!


That evening we celebrated our "last supper" at our favorite pannenkoeken place.

And then on Sunday we drove them back to Amsterdam for their Viking River Cruise to Basel, which they just finished yesterday before flying back to Atlanta:

They said their time with us was a good appetizer. It was Peggy's first time in Europe.
And guess what WE now want to do, as soon as we are able! HA!
That Viking boat really looked nice. Only 200 passengers.

Talk about a great visit, chock-full of the things we love best! Thank you, Bob and Peggy, for coming. We still can't believe the time came and went so fast. Here's till the next time!

And to our next visitors. Who will it be?

Virtual Realities

Another day. Another blogger met. Another photo hunt.
Today is my turn again at Vision & Verb, talking about when we meet blogger friends and when virtual reality becomes...well, real. In the above case, it was Petra, one of our V&V collaborators who happens to live in Tilburg just 30 km from us here in Holland. We knew we'd meet her eventually, so when we found out she was participating in a photo exhibition a week ago, we made a day of it.

The photo exhibition was in the small town of Moergestel, 7 km east of Tilburg in North Brabant province south of us. Approximately 6K residents. Astrid had already Googled the area to see what was there and found out there was a different kind of windmill we don't normally see, just outside the city. So we decided to first get the lay of the land before driving over to the exhibition. This weathervane was on the other side of the street from the windmill, so we got two for the price of one. (Click on image to see what he was shooting.)

This is a standerdmolen from 1852 and is similar to the wipmolen at Kinderdijk I have shown here. Both are post mills but this one has a round(ish) base. It was a frosty morning but the sun was shining.
Even Granny Towanda was in heaven.

From the windmill, Astrid kindly asked TomTom to take us to the Nieuwenhof Castle from the 14th century...and she did (our TomTom is a lady)! In 1840 it became a monastery named the St. Stanislaus Institution. Today it's used as a mental healthcare facility. I feel better already, don't you?!

Then into the tiny town of Moergestel to 'do' our koffie thing (no appeltaart, however, because they forgot to take it out of the freezer the night before). The town square has its ubiquitous church, the Roman Catholic St. John's Beheaded, whose tower was built in 1500. It wasn't open, but not to worry. We heard its one bell ring and we walked around it. Astrid, btw, is taking a picture of a giant bicycle air pump there on the city square.

This is the point at which we then went to meet Petra at her exhibition (photos at the top of the post). By the time we said our Good-Byes, it was time to drive the 7 km to Tilburg to find the water tower on TomTom's list of things to see. It's where we also planned to eat lunch.

But what to our wondering eyes should appear....

...the Adbij Onze Lieve Vrouw van Koningshoeven (Abbey of Our Lady of Koningshoeven) trappist monastery, right out in the middle of nowhere! Talk about changing the plans of mice and [wo]men. See the foggy image (above) of the church? We stopped dead in our tracks because the sun was shining through the windows from the other side...never knowing it was part of a monastery. As we turned the corner, there it was. We had to stop and check it out, of course.


After walking around a bit, it became crystal clear this was a monastery that made and sold its own beer! De Koningshoeven Brewery, a Dutch Trappist brewery, was founded there in 1884 and has an annual production of 145,000 hectoliters (3,830,495 gallons). Tell me someone's not having a lot of fun!


...not far from the restaurant where we decided on the spot to eat our lunch. What serendipity. It was as though the whole day was waiting to surprise us with this place. We could have taken a tour (the only way to get into the church and walk the inner grounds) but it was already crowded and we didn't really want to wait. Another day.


Clearly they do well for themselves. The business was brisk! And the beer was GREAT. Even Astrid, who generally does not drink beer, liked it. The whole experience was totally worth it.


Those monks aren't dummies, of course. They positioned their delightful Kloosterwinkel (Monastic Shop) right at the entrance, where we gladly took a look around and...of course...bought two stone bottles of the Dubbel beer (7% ABV) we had just enjoyed at lunch.
Authentic trappist product!


Astrid is always the Trooper, taking the bag to the car
and then coming back for our last photos before leaving.

Then finally, our last destination of the day....

...the Tilburg water tower, built in 1897 at 50.5 meters high.

Did you notice? We started the day with a weathervane and ended it with a water tower.
And in between, we met a wonderful blogger and then drank to it with a delightful Trappist beer.

How's that for virtual realities becoming the real thing!
More on Vision & Verb....