Delft, Den Hauge and Amsterdam

Grace holding her lunch, looking very happy
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Firstly, we were confused about what was the actual name of the place, we’d always called it Holland, but all the guides called it The Netherlands, but it seems both names are used, seemingly Holland more by the locals and The Netherlands more in official things.

We were getting fairly tired by this stage of our 2 week trip and decided to spend the rest of our time in our little guesthouse set in the country side just out of the small town of Delft, instead of going into Amsterdam.

Tim actually looking happy in a photo!
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We explored Deft, the home of Jan Vermeer an amazing painter, made popular today by the book and movie The Girl with the Pearl Earring. The Vermeer Centre was fascinating, exploring his use of light and his techniques.

On our next day we headed over to Den Hauge, another really beautiful city, but strangely nothing opens until 1pm on Mondays and the small but beautiful museum housing the original of The Girl with the Pearl Earring was shut for the whole day!!! A great disappointment! Still it was a lovely city to walk around, even in the very chilly conditions.

Tim and Grace walking to our room in our country set accomodation
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We spent our last half day in Holland visiting the Van Gough museum in Amsterdam. It houses an amazing collection of his work and provides a great insight into who the artist was and how his different life stages greatly affected his work. We bought quite a few beautiful prints in Holland by both Vermeer and Van Gough, which hopefully we’ll get round to framing soon!

So this brings us to the end of probably our last really big trip through Europe, well at least with just the one child. At times it feels like we’re not doing enough traveling, but so far we’ve been to Germany (we’ve spent nearly 7 days here over two trips), Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, Belgium, The Netherlands, Portugal, one night in France, Scotland and quite a bit of England and have booked our trip through Ireland. So looking back I think we’re doing very well and loving nearly every minute of it!