Friesland Vacation
I went on a beautiful family vacation with the Family Kaptein from last Friday to Monday. We went on vacation to Friesland, the rural area of Holland. There are only 11 cities, and coutless small villages. We also saw lots of farms, cows, sheep, horses, and boats! This area has some of the best sailing in Holland, so there were thousands of boats out too!
We stayed at a “Boerderidj” – a farm house. It was a special vacation house, not sleeping in a cow barn for us city folk. It is a 2 story vacation condo, with 3 bedrooms, and a well equipped living room and kitchen. The farm overlooks flowing green meadows, with cow mooing in the distance, and boats sailing by little canals all around. Our landlady said as a child she sailed a boat to school until they built more modern roadways.
As well as Rob and I, we went with Jan and Nettie (Rob’s Mom and Dad), and his sister Femke, her husband Thomas, and they’re nephew Quinten (who is just about 1 year old). Quinten was the center of attention, smiling and cooing, and keeping everyone on they’re toes. He is crawling, so we all had to watch he did not crawl into a table, stove, or wandering cow. Yes Mom, I hear that, I did get some practice holding and feeding him.
In the daytime, we went biking and sailing in the countryside and saw 2 of the 11 cities in Friesland. In the evening, Rob’s family taught me dutch card games, and we had dinner at the vacation cottage. On Friday, we had a delicious Italian pasta with Blue Cheese, and on Saturday dutch pancakes. The dutch eat panckes for dinner. I can see where Rob gets his cooking abilities, everything was delicious. I helped cut an peel, so maybe a bit of cooking skill got absorbed by osmosis.
I found out that in LA we have car traffic jams, and in Holland there are boat traffic jams. All the waterways (and there are a lot) are spanned by car bridges. All the boats line up and wait for the bridge to be raised on a scheduled basis. At peak time, there were about 50 boats all lined up for passage. I felt sorry for them on Saturday when the bridge guy took an unposted lunch break, so they were there for a few hours until he came back.
We luckily had a way around this bridge problem. Rob’s family rented a small sailboat with a mast that can be lowered. I got freaked out as we approached the bridge with mast still up. The seasoned sailors calmly tossed lines around and lowered the mast as the bridge was quicly approaching while I helped keep the baby out of the way. In fact, that is what I did most of the time…enjoy the scenery and all the colourful boats, and make sure Quinten did not decide to swim to the next boat to say hello.
We sailed in narrow canals, and on a large lake with hundreds of brightly colored boats. It was very beautiful. There were many kinds of sail boats that rob described, and I can only say they all looked like pretty boats but could not name the types if you paid me 500 books. We say a few 100 year old wooden boats of the Frisian type too. I’ll post a photo later.
We sailed both days, and also biked to a near by town. I defiantly learned that I need a kid’s bike. The landlord said “oh yeah, we have a small ladies bike, no problem”. But…a small dutch lady is still about 5 inches taller than me…so I priced biking endpoint, ballerina style, for the ½ hour ride into town.
We visited the largest town there, Snake, where there was a sailing regatta, so lots of pretty boats to see. We visited one of the Water Towers. A hundred years ago, there were water bridges that charded a fee for boats to come into town. This is the only remaining one, and it looks a little like the Disney Land castle. The barges used to go up and down the canals delivering food, goods and cows, as there were few roads. We saw some barges, where an entire family lived in a tiny cabin. I’m glad Rob is an engineer, not a Barge captain. My books would never fit in that tiny cabin!
Some random trivia of the area I learned: Frisian houses have a house in front and attached barn in back. The house is painted black, and the barn red. Black was historically more expensive paint, so you put the expensive paint on the front. Some houses have weathervanes that look like swans. These were special grants from the king allowing those house owners to hunt and eat the swans. Also, we passed a tiny 3 lane village that proudly says it’s a city because the King long ago granted them the right to call themselves a city – even though less than 2000 people live there. Rob’s parents live in a “village” of over 20,000…but since they don’t have a grant from the royalty to call themselves a town, they are a village.
All in all, it was a wonderful welcome by the Family Kaptein for me.
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