Amsterdam

The Airbnb we stayed at near Amsterdam was really fun.  It was out in the countryside of Utrecht and it was on a working farm.  The building looked like an old-school motel and we had three rooms.  Jenn stayed in one of the rooms with the girls, Dave stayed in the other room with two boys, and Jill and I stayed in the third room with the other two boys.  The children all loved seeing the baby lambs in the backyard.  During our first night, the farmer came out with bottles of milk and he let our kids feed them.  They loved that. 

The day we went to Amsterdam, we started a bit outside of town in a "pioneer village" type of place, called Zaanse Schans.  It is a Dutch heritage site that included a museum, chocolate factory, wooden shoe workshop, pewter foundry, as well as a historical village with windmills.

We started in the Zaans Museum.  It told the history of this part of the Netherlands.  During the 1600s and 1700s, this area was the center of industry in the Netherlands.  Hundreds of windmills powered all sorts of factories:  saw mills, cocoa, rice, starch, oil, and more.   It was a really cool place and audioguides helped us all stay interested.

This ship was a replica of a group of sailors who sailed to the North Pole and were attacked by a polar bear.  One of the men that escaped was said to have lived, however he never lost the look of fear in his eyes.  

The boys loved this painting.  It's a depiction of a story that happened in a local town where a bull attacked a man and his pregnant wife.  Both of them died, but as the bull gored the pregnant woman, she was tossed in the air.  The baby fell out and lived!  The villagers killed the bull and mourned the loss of the couple.  The child was baptized and lived for several months before it died of an illness.  Quite a remarkable story. 

The largest exhibit in the museum was a replica of the Verkade Chocolate Factory.  We watched the process of chocolates and cookies being made.

Just like "I Love Lucy," when Lucy worked the assembly line, our boys sorted the chocolates digitally using these monitors.  Chocolates "traveled" down an assembly line and the children sorted them into the "box."  They had so much fun.

Most every day of our trip we took a family Christmas card picture.  We took this picture with the windmills thinking it would be a great Christmas card picture.  Sadly, Landon wasn't very happy and didn't give us his best smile.

After the museum, we walked through the village.  Our first stop was a wooden shoe shop.  Holland is famous for wooden shoes.  Outside of the shop there are some great picture opportunities.

These guys demonstrated how to make a wooden shoe.  It was really fascinating to see how fast they could make them out of a block of wood.

Europeans never fake being polite and sometimes they are just plain rude.  Dave and Tanner wanted lunch at a restaurant next to the one the rest of us ate at.  Our servers wouldn't let them eat at our tables, though, and told them they had to eat at the other tables.  I had to grab a picture of Dave and Tanner eating at their table.  Later, I pulled out my water bottle from my backpack and the server told me, "I'm sorry you can't drink that here."  Unbelievable.  I couldn't even drink!  It wasn't inside the restaurant, and the entire place was conducive for everyone to have a backpack and a water bottle.  It was frustrating.

This entire village smelled like chocolate.  Jill described it as the delicious smell you get when you melt unsweetened chocolate and butter to make brownies.  Everyone loved the constant smell.  Everyone that is except Alyssa.  She did not like it one bit.

The best part of the village was the windmills.  There were six along the water and they were so cool.  We toured this awesome windmill where they sawed wood.  People that worked there were surnamed "sawyer."  It was really neat to see the wood being cut by wind power.

Here is a pretty garden and the small pewter foundry. 

We had a terrific morning and early afternoon in Zaanse Schans.  We left there and drove to Amsterdam to go on a canal cruise.  The place we parked was unlike anything I have navigated before.  I drove into a car elevator!!  Then the elevator took our car down a level where I parked.  I was a bit worried, and I couldn't believe Dave got his Honda Odyssey into the elevator.  He must have had only inches on all sides! 

Our canal cruise wasn't for about an hour so we got a snack at a hot dog stand and the children played at a nearby playground. 

Here is our canal cruise ship.  Our tour lasted 75 minutes and took us all around the central part of the city.  The canals and architecture really make Amsterdam a beautiful city.

Amsterdam has so many bicycles, even more than Rotterdam!  Here is a public bicycle parking place with thousands of bicycles!  All the bicycles look similar.  There aren't cheap or expensive bicycles, they are all average.

It's fun as the children are getting bigger because they can sit together and let moms and dads sit together.

One of the cool places we cruised by was the Anne Frank house.  It was really crowded so we didn't go in, but it was fun to cruise by.  Here are some other cool buildings we were able to cruise by.

We loved this quote and I wanted to remember it.  It's from a philosopher who said, "Like all great travelers I have seen more than I remember and I remember more than I have seen."

After cruising the canals we went back to our motel to rest.  Everyone was still hungry so Dave and I went for a dinner run and picked up some soap at a grocery store (we went through all of our soap) and picked up some food from McDonald's.  We really know how to eat fine cuisine when we travel.

Rotterdam

Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, is all about bicycles.  It's unbelievable how many people ride bicycles around the city.  There are way more bicycles than cars.  The roads accommodate for bicycles with dedicated bike lanes, and the city even accommodates for bicycle parking.  Check out this underground storage for bicycles!  It holds over 10,000 bicycles!

It's only natural that we would do a bicycle tour of Rotterdam.  Last year, my cousin Adrianne told us how much fun she had on the Sound of Music bicycle tour in Salzburg.  We took her advice and spent the money to do the bicycle tour and it was one of everyone's favorite thing to do.  Dave and Jenn have since done other bicycle tours through Europe because they are so much fun, and they organized this tour for us.  It was so much fun!

Makenna and Alyssa were going to ride along with us dads while everyone else would have their own bicycle.  Makenna doesn't feel completely comfortable riding a bicycle, so Dave planned on both girls riding along. Alyssa did not like that idea at all.  She was determined to ride her own bicycle.  After we tried to tell her it would be a long ride and she would have to keep up, we relented and let her have her own bike.  She felt so big.  Alyssa may have had more fun than anyone else!

Everyone got outfitted for a bicycle and we headed out from the train station in the city center.

Our tour guide shared lots of fun facts about the city.  Rotterdam had been the largest port city in the world for generations.  The Chinese just built a port bigger than Rotterdam, but until that time Rotterdam was the largest by a wide margin.  Our guide told us that the port goes on for over 26 miles of harbor where ships can unload their freight and it then goes out to all of Europe by train.

Even through they have tons of bicycles the city isn't littered with bicycles.  There are rules to keep the city looking nice.  While we learned about the city, the bicycle enforcement police came by and cut off the lock on this bike for being parked illegally. 

This is our happy little girl and her bike.  It rained during much of the tour.  Thankfully, our guide had ponchos to keep us dry.

I missed taking a picture of an old church.  It was one of the oldest buildings in the city (one of the few buildings left standing after the Nazi invasion).  Our guide told us that there had been many wars over religion in Europe and so many people died.  He told us that in Rotterdam, however, during the Reformation the Catholics in the city all decided to be Protestant and they simply changed the sign on the church.

Deciderious Erasmus was one of Europe's greatest thinkers and he was born in Rotterdam.  Erasmus was a humanist who's credited with writing: "Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself," and "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes."  Here is a statue to honor Rotterdam's favorite son.

Our guide told us that when the Nazis invaded they didn't expect such a fight from the hard workers of Rotterdam.  The men fought so hard, the only way the Nazis won was by bombing the entire town and basically leveling the entire city.  Because everything was destroyed, the city was rebuilt and everything is relatively new in Rotterdam (compared to the rest of Europe).  Here is a modern apartment building with an open market inside, called Market Hall.  The apartments are really expensive but it would be fun to look down on the market and walk around in the cold winter months.

Here is the view from inside the market.  It was inspired by "A Bug's Life."  

During our tour I took a lot of video.  It was edited together and put to music so we could remember the bicycle tour.  

This building on the right is called "the pencil."

We rode past some cool boats. 

The farthest most point on the tour.  We could see some ships in the water and we rode right next to a cruise ship in port.  The rain let up and it actually got really hot right here.  After being rained on, it was nice to see a bit of sunshine.  The weather wasn't perfect for our tour, but it didn't dampen our fun. 

In the 1800's many people left Europe to go to America and Rotterdam was one of the primary ports used by the emigrants.  The city has honored this time period by writing down some of the destinations.  In a few days, I would be leaving Europe and traveling to Utah so I had to take a picture.

On the ride back to return our bicycles the heavens opened up and it really rained hard.  We stopped for some brief shelter.

We took our bicycles back to the amazing underground bicycle garage. 

For lunch we ate at Subway.  I finally decided it to give the children diet soda.  The Buxtons all drink colas and our kids begged on a daily basis to get cola (rather than root beer or Sprite). They were in heaven drinking Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi (or Pepsi Light as they call it in Europe).

After lunch, we drove through Delft and then to the Hague.  The Frankfurt Temple is closed for renovations so the saints in Germany can either drive six hours to Switzerland or six hours to the Hague.  Since we were so close, we decided to stop and visit and walk around the grounds.  They were under construction, but the temple still looked very nice.

Just behind the temple we walked to a street with lots of shops so we could get a snack. 

This place had awesome cheese!

We all got an ice cream which proved to be bad for Hayden because it had egg in it.

After seeing the temple at The Hague and eating our ice cream, we drove through more of the city.  The Hague isn't the capital of the Netherlands but it is where their Supreme Court is and often times world disputes are taken to the Hague to be resolved.

When Alyssa was little she couldn't pronounce Logan's name.  For some reason, she liked calling him "Hig."  It turned into a fun nickname that we sometimes still use.  We had to take a picture of "Hig at the Hague".